


Fire in Her Eyes

by Love_andbalance



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death, Descent into Madness, Destruction, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Pregnancy, Rage, Reylo babies, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Very Dark Rey, weird Force stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:41:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 44,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23865442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Love_andbalance/pseuds/Love_andbalance
Summary: We are a new breed risingWith Fire in our eyesWe Don’t fear anythingBecause we’ve already diedPalpatine has been destroyed. The Final Order has been defeated. The First Order is losing its grip on the galaxy. Everyone around her celebrates.But Ben Solo is dead, and Rey has lost half of her soul in a scheme devised by the Jedi...to defeat the Sith at all costs, no matter who it hurts.Lost in her grief and reeling from their betrayal, Rey sets out to exact her revenge on the galaxy.Perhaps they shouldn't have traded a Skywalker for a Palpatine after all...
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 221
Kudos: 181
Collections: Ijustfellintothissendhelp





	1. Alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All my friends tell me I should move on  
> I'm lying in the ocean, singing your song  
> Ah, that's how you sing it- Dark Paradise, Lana del Rey

“I’ll always be with you.”

Ben’s voice spoke so clearly in her head that for a moment she thought he was actually murmuring in her ear.

She could feel him, a strong pulsing presence in the Force, closer now than he had ever been, and she drew comfort from that as she stared in shock down at the place where his body had fallen and vanished.

Her fingers were still clutched in his black sweater, dirty and stained with sweat and blood. There was a hole in the front, burned into it by his own saber wielded by her hand.

And yet, even as she had wobbled on the edge of her darkness, both there on the ruined tech of a fallen empire, and here in the darkness of a Sith temple, he had come for her.

Ben had always come for her. He had offered her everything even as she had thrown it in his face again and again. In the end, he had given up everything for her.

He had saved her from her grandfather, saved her from herself.

He had given her his own life. She had felt that truth as he began to fade from consciousness. The joy that had washed over him when their lips met gradually replaced with fear and regret as his strength slipped away.

That truth had been devastating. It meant that he had loved her. In the same overwhelming and consuming way that she had loved him. They had wasted so much time fighting and misunderstanding each other. Manipulated and pulled apart by Snoke and Palpatine.

She hadn’t been able to acknowledge her own feelings for him before it was too late, and the regret and grief that had clawed at her insides as his body began to fade had threatened to consume her.

Only his voice and the warm comforting balm of his presence through their bond, had driven her back from the edge of panic and rage.

He had promised to be with her, as he had always been even when they were not yet aware of it, and he had never lied to her before.

If he said he would be with her, then he would be. She let that truth wash over her as well, calming her fears.

She smiled, clutching that seed of hope in her heart as she stood. She pulled his sweater up to clutch against her chest and she half ran, half stumbled from the dark cavern, tripping over scattered pieces of broken stone.

The throne had been demolished and the bodies of the Sith cultists seemed to have been disintegrated or buried under fallen rubble. No one lived to try and stop her as she ran.

She passed the bodies of the Knights of Ren without looking. They had betrayed Ben, and she felt so sympathy for the part she had played in their deaths.

Lightening and lasers flashed across the sky as she ran out of the temple into Exegol’s surface. The Resistance was rapidly destroying what remained of the First Order fleet.

She paused for a moment, watching the destruction. The Resistance had become her family. More so than the parents she barely remembered, or Plutt with his greedy eyes, and certainly more than Palpatine.

She had gotten his blood, but she would never accept his legacy.

She had rejected the lineage of the Sith, embraced hope and the legacy of the Jedi. They had channeled their energy through her, a willing vessel for their power as they had stood together against the great evil of the galaxy.

They had spoken to her, encouraged her…and left her, she realized abruptly. Once the job of killing Palpatine was done.

She pushed the thought away as she resumed her limping run to Luke’s old X wing, chastising herself for having momentary doubts about the Jedi.

She climbed into the cockpit of her aircraft, carefully avoiding letting her eyes land on the TIE fighter not far away. It hadn’t been there when she arrived, and now it would never leave.

She absently tucked Ben’s sweater unto her lap as she ran through the necessary preflight checks and settled the old fighter pilot’s helmet onto her head. It reminded her of the one she had worn on Jakku.

That felt like a lifetime ago.

The lonely young woman that she had once been seemed more like a shadow now than a part of herself. The past year had changed everything for her, given her so much.

She was no longer alone. She had family, friendship, love…

Her heart skipped a beat and she reached out, tugging on the bond that always brought her to Ben. He was quiet in her mind, but she could feel him there, steady and strong. He was still with her, and she clung to his calming presence as the X wing lifted off the ground.

It didn’t take her long to escape the atmosphere on Exegol and though the path back to Ajan Kloss was difficult to navigate, the trip was uneventful.

Everyone else had already arrived, and hers was the last ship to land on the planet’s hot and humid surface. It was gloriously green, a stark contrast to the darkness of space of the cold, blue glow of Exegol.

The noise of celebration hit her as soon as she opened the cockpit, carried inside on a wave of hot, sticky air that clung to her skin.

Everywhere she looked there was a dizzying mass of bright, swirling colors as people ran through the crowd. Everyone was searching for loved ones and hugging each other.

She was not so foolish that she believed everyone had made it back, and indeed there were several panicked faces registering growing fear as those they cared about couldn’t be located in the mass of shifting people.

That would have to be dealt with, and their grief not forgotten in the face of so many others’ joy. It would be easy to overlook when there was so much to celebrate but feeling isolated in their pain could only lead to festering resentment. The Resistance owed them care for the loss of their loved ones.

She was distracted from her thoughts when she finally caught sight of a very familiar face in the crowd. Relief washed through her as she ran to Finn. He was already standing with Poe and she threw arms around them, heedless of the blood, dirt, and sweat that still covered her.

They clutched her tightly, both of them radiating joy and relief into the Force as they clung together in the aftermath of battle.

It should have felt like home, because she loved them both dearly, but her mind wandered back to a moment on Exegol, to feeling Ben when he arrived to help her and had laid himself bare and vulnerable in the bond between them.

That had been home. That had been true belonging. There had been no barriers and no secrets between them.

She tightened her arms around her friends, forcing the image of Ben’s bloody but determined face from her mind. There was still joy here, with friends who cared about her, and relief that she had not lost them. It battled within her as she tried hard not to let thoughts of what it had cost her ruin her happiness.

She knew her smile was strained at the edges, that tears had gathered at the corners of her eyes, but she turned away from them before they could notice, before they could ask.

They would never understand what had happened on Exegol.

She had never been able to share her experiences with Ben and they knew nothing about the dyad. How could they possibly begin to understand her loss? The love she had for him, that he had for her, was too complex and too deep to explain.

She stepped away, holding onto her pain and tucking it away as she reached out through the bond for Ben. Still there, she reassured herself. No different now than it had been when she was with the Resistance and he with the First Order. Out of sight, but always with her.

If a small voice in her mind whispered that she had now lost the hope of being reunited with him, she ignored it.

It was _fine_. She _was fine_.

She spotted Rose through a gap in the mass of people, grinning up at Chewie, and strode through the crowd to embrace them both.

Rose guided her to a bed, helped to clean the blood from her face. She slept for hours, waking the following day with a sense of dread that invaded her mind before the memory that told her he was gone.

She retrieved his sweater, tucking it under her pillow, and carefully scrubbed at her clothing until the blood and dirt washed away. She had died in these clothes, but she had also held Ben in these clothes. His hands had rubbed against the white fabric and she refused to throw it away. Wearing it was almost enough for her to still feel his fingers on her neck, the warmth of his arms around her. 

It comforted her as she went about her days. No one seemed to notice her grief but she reassured herself that she preferred it that way.

She had her family, she reminded herself firmly, and she was _fine_.

It became a mantra that she repeated to herself over the next few months as she tried to keep herself too busy to think, too busy to feel.

 _I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine…_ She repeated it so often that she believed it.

At first she worked with the others, helping to plan the necessary battles that drove the First Order back and helped the Resistance gain back territory, but as time went by she began to feel more sullen, more withdrawn from the friends who laughed and smiled in her presence.

She would smile tightly in return and reach again for Ben in the bond. It had begun to ache, like a small wound, but she welcomed it as a reminder that he was still there, even as she tried desperately not to think about him directly.

She couldn’t acknowledge him, not even his name in her thoughts, without the events of Exegol chasing themselves across her mind in horrifying detail.

Not the grotesque smell of Palpatine’s rotting flesh, or the flash of his lightening burning across the sky. It was always Ben. She could almost feel his lips on hers, almost see the pallor of his face as his body began to fade away.

Unable to bear it, she tucked her emotions away and put an ever-increasing distance between herself and those around her.

Finn and Poe came to her less and less often, shaking their heads in bewilderment and huffing out frustrated sighs when their attempts to draw her into conversation increasingly failed to gain anything more than absent stares and murmured apologies.

Finn’s softly worded concerns were often overshadowed by Poe’s anger, his raised voice handing out his insistence that they needed her help.

“I’ve done enough,” she finally snapped, not bothering to elaborate as she stomped away. He left her alone after that, glaring at her whenever she crossed his path.

Her life had become progressively emptier as the months slowly passed. Her isolation increased with each passing day as she shunned even Rose’s concerned attempts to draw her into conversation. Rose, at least, did not leave her completely. She came at least once a day to sit quietly while Rey worked. She was worried, and if offering Rey her silent support was all that she could do then she seemed determined to do it.

As she withdrew, she lost herself in Jedi texts.

The Jedi had saved the galaxy, and though she had not seen or heard from them since they had spoken to her on Exegol, she knew she had to carry on their legacy. To do otherwise would have made her sacrifices on their behalf feel meaningless and empty, and she had already begun to feel so hollow.

Surely embracing her Jedi legacy would help to ease some of her growing pain.

She spent countless hours hovering over the ancient Jedi texts, rejecting Beaumont Kim’s attempts to continue helping her translate.

He frowned; concern etched into his face when she clutched the book to her chest and painted her too tight smile on her face as she asked him in calm measured words to leave her to work in private. He walked out, clearly offended by her sudden change in attitude, and did not return.

She allowed only C3PO to get close enough to aid her.

They contained everything she needed to take her next steps as a Jedi, and she began to focus on completing her lightsaber. It was new design that she was fashioning from her staff and a yellow kyber crystal that had been given to her by Leia.

The loss of her mentor had been a painful blow to her already aching heart. Perhaps if she had still had Leia, she might have been able to speak of what happened to her. Leia could have helped her make sense of everything that had happened.

All of the things that Luke had said, and her feelings about being Palpatine’s granddaughter, and of course she would also have mourned…Rey closed the thought down, absently reaching for him and the ever growing but now familiar ache.

Leia would have understood why that ache had become the only thing that helped her feel alive and what to do about it. But Leia was gone, and her Jedi journey was all that Rey had left.

She begun to contemplate ways to honor them, both Luke and Leia, for what they had done to help her. Ways that would give her reason to leave Ajan Kloss and its noise and the constant press of life that thrummed through the Force.

She wasn’t sure when that had gone from a comfort to a constant irritant, but it plucked constantly at the edges of her mind, distracting her and leaving her feeling irritable and on edge. It disrupted her sleep and she woke often on the edges of dreams she couldn’t remember, with grief frozen in her chest and tears still wet on her cheeks.

She reached for him then, in the night when she felt the most hopeless and alone, seeking out the bright spot of pain where he used to be in the Force and grasping for threads of his presence to provide comfort.

The day that she could not longer feel him was the day she left.

She woke with the dawn, fear and loss clouding her mind as she struggled to free herself from the clutches of her nightmare. Her fingers tangled instinctively in the sweater that she kept tucked beneath her pillow, pulling it to her cheek and inhaling the faint scent of his skin that lingered in the soft cotton fabric.

She reached for him, but all she sound was pain. There was nothing but a huge aching hole that existed where his energy had always been. She was alone, for the first time in her life.

She grabbed her belongings, the texts and the lightsabers and Ben’s sweater, and stuffed it all in a bag.

“I’m leaving,” she announced abruptly, walking briskly up to a stunned group of her friends and staring at them in silent challenge.

Rose and Finn stared at her with open mouths, while Poe threw his hands up in frustration.

“You can’t” he barked. “We still haven’t pushed the First Order back any farther than…“ he began, but Rey cut him off mid-sentence.

“I’m leaving Poe,” she said again. “I have things I need to take care of.”

He didn’t answer, turning on his heel and stalking away.

She turned to face Finn and Rose. “I’m taking the Falcon,” she announced, stepping around them as she started a brisk walk through camp toward the battered freighter.

“Rey, wait!” Finn called, falling into step beside her and reaching for her arm. “You can’t just take the Falcon and go alone. I’ll go with you!”

Rose caught up to them as Rey stopped to face Finn. “I need to do this alone,” she explained them, shooting Rose a pleading look that begged for support and understanding.

Rose placed her hand on Finn’s arm, and he drug his panicked eyes to her face. “I know you’re worried about her,” Rose whispered softly, “we all are, but you have to let her go if that’s what she needs to do.”

Finn sighed and shook his head. “Poe’s gonna be pissed about the Falcon,” he predicted.

Rey forced a smile. “Wait till he finds out I took his droid,” she said, jerking her head in BB-8’s direction as he rolled through camp toward her.

“Seriously?” Finn asked in astonishment and even Rose looked doubtful this time.

“Poe’s been busy. He probably won’t even notice. And if he does, well…” she shrugged and resumed walking.

They didn’t follow her this time and it didn’t long for her to close the door of the Falcon and settle comfortably in the familiar pilot’s seat.

She was hard to fly without a copilot, and Rey had thought of inviting Chewie, but he had left several days ago on a mission with Lando and hadn’t yet returned.

So BB-8 would be her only company of this trip.

He beeped companionably at her as she eased the freighter into hyperspace, and she shook her head.

“No big mission this time,” she said, “just something personal that I need to take care of.”

He beeped quizzically.

“You’ll see,” she admonished quietly. BB-8 wasn’t fond of desert planets, so he wasn’t going to be pleased with their destination.

It was a quiet trip filled with grim determination. She knew what she had to do, and she was prepared to do it.

The Falcon emerged from hyperspace over a bleak desert planet with twin suns.

She skimmed past the small, dusty settlements and roving bands of unfamiliar desert dwellers. It wasn’t Jakku, but it had the same dry and miserable horizon.

She followed the coordinates that Luke had once programed into the Falcon’s computer system and set the Falcon down in the sand outside the Lars homestead. BB-8 beeped sadly and she patted the top of his domed head.

“Sorry, buddy. You can stay in the ship of you like.”

He hesitated but ultimately followed her out when the Falcon’s door hissed open.

The air was dry and still hot and the familiar feeling of sand in her eyes and throat settled over her almost immediately, but her attention was drawn to the buildings on the horizon.

They were half buried and bleached white by the sun.

Leia had told her about this place. It had been Luke’s childhood home.

Leia had been raised elsewhere, royalty for a planet that had been destroyed by the Empire. Luke’s Jedi temple had been destroyed and so had Leia’s home on the Hosnian system where she had spent her years in the Senate.

This small and barren skeleton of a moisture farm was the closest thing she had to a place that meant something to their family.

She spent a few minutes roaming around, wondering what life had been like for Luke. In some ways it reminded her of her own childhood on a hot desert planet, but Luke had been blessed with a family, with love and a full stomach.

There wasn’t much left, anything of value had long ago been picked clean by scavengers, and she soon made her way to an inconspicuous patch of sand within sight of the main buildings.

She knelt, taking out Luke and Leia’s sabers and wrapping them carefully in soft brown cloth. A quick wave of her hand and they were swallowed by the sand.

As fitting a burial as she could imagine, considering there had been no bodies for her to grieve over.

She reached for her hip, pulling out her now finished saber and flicking the switch to ignite the bright yellow blade. She would have preferred a double blade and hoped that someday she would have another crystal to create one, but she didn’t want to use someone else’s any longer. A single blade would do for now.

A voice in the silence started her, and she jumped to her feet, allowing the saber blade to vanish as she did so.

An old woman stood framed against the horizon, leading a large pack animal. She eyed Rey curiously. “There’s been no one for so long,” she said, with a voice that was hoarse and ragged from so many years in the desert. “Who are you?”

“I’m Rey,” she said, unable to force herself to take her grandfather’s name. Her parents ill advised plan to sell her into slavery to hide her from his clutches wasn’t enough for her to embrace a name that brought a reign of death and terror to the galaxy.

“Rey who?” the old woman persisted.

A ripple of movement caught Rey’s eye and she turned her head to see Luke and Leia silhouetted against the desert sky.

They looked calm and peaceful. Her eyes scanned expectantly, but no other figure appeared.

_Take it, Rey. You’ve earned it._

This was it, she thought, the approval that would fill the hole in her life. She would take the name, step into the legacy, fulfill the expectations of the Jedi and then they would be with her. She would not be alone.

She turned back to the old woman, triumphant in her certainty. “Rey Skywalker,” she announced firmly.

The old woman nodded and shuffled away without comment, leaving Rey and BB-8 standing together facing the setting suns. Rey smiled, forcing all of her hope into the desperate curving of her lips.

She had done everything she needed to do. With the help of the Jedi and her new family in the Resistance, she had resisted Palpatine, she had saved the galaxy, she had forged her own saber.

She was grateful for everything they had done to help her, to save her. Grateful to all of them.

And Ben, she reminded herself.

_And Ben. And Ben. And Ben. And Ben._

The words echoed in her mind, getting louder with each passing moment.

He hadn’t been here. He should have been. Luke had been here, and Leia. Where was he? He had promised to be with her always.

“Be with me,” she whispered, reaching out for him again and still finding only pain.

“Be with me,” she repeated, more firmly. “Ben….”

The air around her remained empty and the wound in her soul remained a screaming void of pain and loss. The first tear slid down her cheek as the suns slipped below the horizon, plunging her into darkness.


	2. The Betrayal of the Jedi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every time I close my eyes  
> It's like a dark paradise- Dark Paradise, Lana del Rey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW/CW
> 
> Mention of unfulfilled desire for pregnancy and children.

The air cooled immediately when the suns set below the horizon, leaving Rey alone in the darkness with only a stolen droid and the echo of other people’s memories. She was alone in the desert again, she realized, only this time she felt the pain of her isolation even more keenly.

Since she had fled the desert of Jakku she had known the fullness of love and the oneness of her connection with her other half.

That was gone now and the promise of her role as the successor to the Jedi had failed to replace it in the uplifting way she had hoped for. Their legacy had not filled the hole in her heart that Ben’s death had left behind.

He hadn’t been with Luke and Leia, though she had been so sure that he would be, and she could no longer feel him in their bond. Like everything else in her life, he had been taken from her.

Rey ignored the tears that had begun to run down her face as she turned on her heel and stalked angrily toward the _Falcon_.

BB-8 followed quickly behind her, emitting a series of confused beeps, and trying desperately to avoid the trail of rapidly shifting sands that developed in her wake as her emotions careened unchecked through the Force..

It wasn’t fair, she thought, as she stomped loudly up the ramp. He should be with her. She should have both halves of herself. Ben had promised he would be with her and she had earned that, from the Force and from the Jedi.

She had done everything that everyone had asked of her from the moment that her life on Jakku had been upended by a chance encounter with a droid.

From that moment, everything in her had been given to the Resistance and to the Jedi. Not once had she questioned their position. Not once she truly questioned their teachings.

She had believed for one brief moment that Luke had been wrong about Ben, but she had paid for that hadn’t she?

When he had extended his hand to her again and again and she had been forced to put her own desires aside and reject him, forced to see the pain in his eyes when he realized that he had killed Snoke for her and her loyalty had been to the Resistance all along.

Forced to see it yet again when he realized she had given herself to the Jedi after what she knew Luke had tried to do to him.

The thought of it, after so long of refusing to examine any of it too deeply, tore through her heart in staggering waves of pain and regret.

The lights flickered as she made her way blindly through the familiar inside of the ship and her stomach gave a loud rumble.

She couldn’t recall the last time she had eaten, and BB-8 let out a series of reproachful beeps that brought her awareness back to her current needs and made her sigh.

She rummaged in the _Falcon’s_ main hold, scraping together stale crackers and old fruit that nearly begun to rot. There was little food aboard, as she had long since stopped giving much thought to her next meal.

She sat at the small table and nibbled unenthusiastically, trying to force enough into her body that her hunger would abate.

Food had become flavorless so gradually that she had barely noticed until it all tasted like ash on her tongue and she had only allowed the realization of it drive her further into her studies, so certain that the Jedi held the answers that she sought.

She had tried so hard to put everything else aside, to drive it all out of her mind.

All that she had done, every choice she had made had been because she had believed that they were right, and that Ben was wrong.

She left the remnants of her dinner forgotten in the table and wandered aimlessly in the direction of the _Falcon_ ’s bedchamber. Her head was spinning, overwhelmed by thoughts that she had tried for so long to keep at bay that now refused to be silenced.

The Jedi were supposed to be the light, hope, and salvation.

She paused in the dim light of the hallway, letting the truth of what happened on Exegol and in all of the days since finally wash over her.

She had followed the light and it had brought her death and despair.

Her footsteps echoed in the silence as she made her way to the Falcon’s fresher, passing the familiar halls and the lone bedchamber without really seeing it.

She had gotten Han Solo’s ship when what she had desperately needed was Han Solo’s son.

As she stripped layers of sand covered clothing from her body and stepped beneath the spray of hot water, she wondered how many times she had fantasized about him joining her here after he offered her his hand in the throne room.

Thoughts of him smiling at her from the pilot’s chair had flashed across her mind every day, driven ruthlessly back as she tried to keep her mind on defeating the First Order.

She had never given up hope, but she had always believed that there would be more time, that he would come back to her and the light when the war was over. 

She tipped her head back, letting the water run over her face and carry away her tears as the first small sob coursed through her.

Perhaps she should have taken his hand when he had offered it to her. She had wanted to, wanted it so much that she felt like the desire to do so might tear her in two, but she had wanted him to be whole and happy, instead of twisted and in pain as he had been on the dark side.

But the truth was that she would rather have been with him in the darkness, than not at all.

They had run out of time and now he was gone because he had run to her when she needed him most. He had given up everything, turned his back on power and pride and control because she had insisted that was the only way.

Her guilt built inside her as his face appeared in her mind. Bloody and beaten but shining with love and hope.

It had felt good, so good, to see him there and know that he was on her side and they were finally going to be together.

She sank to her knees, wrapping her arms around herself in a desperate attempt to hold her body together as the sobs came harder and faster and shook her to her core. 

There had been no doubt in her mind, when she saw him standing there in Exegol, that everything was going to be fine.

She finally had Ben and she had the Jedi. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Luke had told her that it was her destiny to face Palpatine, she thought savagely, beginning to rock back and forth as the water poured over her. It had turned cold, but she didn’t notice as her skin turned pale and blue.

If it was her destiny, how could it all have gone so wrong? She shouldn’t be alone sobbing on the floor of a fresher and mourning the life she would never get to live.

Losing Ben had cost her everything. Her future stretched out before her, a barren landscape of duty with no room for attachment.

She wanted attachment- wanted love, wanted life. It was a secret dream that she had kept close to her heart and carried in silence.

No matter how many times she had tried to convince herself that the tug of longing she felt at seeing a child with loving parents was a desire for the people who had long ago abandoned her, deep inside she had always known the truth.

It was too late for her to have parents, but it hadn’t been too late for her to have children of her own.

Her fingers curved, clawing into her abdomen, and leaving bloody lines in the skin over an empty womb.

She tried to imagine what it would be like to have children now, to hold babies that didn’t have Ben’s smile or his shock of wavy black hair, but she couldn’t. There were no children in her future without Ben, and the ghosts of the Jedi were a poor replacement.

It was one more loss, one more blow that she would never recover from.

She sobbed until she had no more tears left, her cries an echoing wail of loss and grief and barely processed rage at the unfairness of it all.

By the time she was finished, her mind was empty, and her body was drained and begging for sleep.

She pushed herself up from the floor and turned the water off the flow of water with shaking hands. She was cold and aching as she stumbled on frozen feet to the bedroom.

She didn’t bother with her clothing or even a blanket, she simply dropped her exhausted body onto the bed and slipped easily into a deep sleep.

This time she remembered her dreams, her mind no longer able to resist the images that she had not been able to face in the months since she had seen part of her soul die.

Luke stood before her on Ahch-to, explaining that Leia’s vision had predicted the death of her son at the end of her Jedi path.

“Here,” he said holding out Leia’s saber with a serene smile, “take it. She knew someone else would finish her path one day.”

Rey frowned, shaking her head. “I can’t. Leia told you that if her path is finished, Ben will die.”

“A small price to pay for the Jedi’s final victory over the Sith. Ben has fallen. He doesn’t deserve to be Jedi or a Skywalker.” Luke looked at her patiently. “Overcoming attachment is the way of the Jedi.”

Memories of Ben’s words tumbled through her mind, his fear and his pain as he described Luke’s attempt to kill him at the Jedi temple.

“I won’t help you kill him,” she said firmly.

Luke tipped his head and smiled at her with pride, “You already have.”

She shook her head, denying the terrible truth, and turned to run, but the green of Ahch-to vanished, replaced by the dim blue glow of Palpatine’s throne room on Exegol.

She could see Ben, glorious and alive, running into the Sith temple to save her. Her heart ached as she saw hope dawn across her own face when the dream showed her herself as she had been in that heartbreaking moment.

“Go back!” she screamed at him helplessly, desperate to try and save them both, to change the past, but he couldn’t hear her.

She watched helplessly as Ben and the past version of herself were stripped of their power and as Ben struggled to stand and face her grandfather alone. She wept as she saw for the first time the brutality of his fall into the pit.

This time, she fell with him.

She watched in horror as his body hit ragged outcroppings of rock and broke with sickening thuds as he careened into the crevasse, finally landing in a heap on one particularly large protrusion.

He was unconscious but she could see the shallow rise and fall of his chest. She looked around expectantly, sure that now the Jedi would come for him, as they had come for her. He had come back to the light. They would help him.

Slow minutes ticked by in silence as her hope dimmed before he finally stirred, his first movement eliciting a low groan of pain. His eyes fluttered open and he pushed himself to his hands and knees, crawling determinedly toward the rock wall and beginning to climb his way back to her.

He was panting in exhaustion and clearly in agony, she was sure that several of his bones were broken, but he persisted, and finally heaved himself over the edge and into the throne room.

It was as she remembered it after the destruction of Palpatine, broken and empty. She could see her own body dirty and crumpled on the floor.

Ben stumbled, partially crawling the distance between the pit and the place where she lay motionless. He finally reached her, rubbing desperately at her hands and arms.

“Can you hear me?” he called to her softly, “hold on!” He sounded so broken and afraid and Rey sobbed quietly as the dream showed her how gently he had pulled her into his lap.

He searched her face for signs for life, but her eyes were open and staring.

He looked around, fear and confusion on his face. He was looking for help, she realized. Looking one last time for the Jedi to do something for him in his life and this time it wasn’t even for him. It was for her.

And still, they had not come. They never came for him, she thought bitterly.

Not for him in the pit, and not for her as she lay dead on the floor.

They had used her to defeat their enemy and then abandoned her and her other half in the dyad to face fear, suffering, and death alone.

She watched Ben as he placed his hand on her abdomen and poured his life into her body. He looked so calm, so certain that this was the right thing to do.

She wanted to stop him, to tell him how much she needed him to be the one to live, but she knew the dream wouldn’t allow it. She could only watch in agony, eyes scanning his precious face as she tried to memorize every detail before he was taken from her again even in dreams.

Her hand came to rest on his, and his eyes flew to her face. Had he known that he would live to see her eyes open, or had he expected his death to be instant?

He looked so frightened when she had sat up and said his name, like he expected her to leave, to be angry that he was holding her.

Had she shown him enough how much she loved him in the few fleeting moments of togetherness that they had been given? His smile after she kissed him had been blinding in its joy. Would he have looked at her like that every day for the rest of their long lives if she had taken his hand sooner?

She watched as he fell, as he disappeared into the Force and took half of her soul, just as helpless to stop it as she had been the first time.

 _This was the Jedi’s fault_.

She woke with a start, jerking herself awake at the thought. The interior of the Falcon was still quiet, still calm, but she was not.

A hot, burning rage had begun to simmer inside her, burning away her tears. She reached out through the Force and sank her mind into the wound where Ben’s presence should have been, letting the pain flow through her.

They had betrayed her, betrayed Ben. They were supposed to be heroes and they had treated Ben as though he was expendable. They had allowed him to die and left her here alone.

Rey’s stomach twisted as she thought of Leia, standing next to the man that had tried to kill her son with a smile on her face. Luke had done nothing to atone, nothing to help Ben when he was trying so hard and struggling for his own life and hers.

Where had they been when he was dragging his broken body out of a pit? His grandfather? His uncle? His mother?

They had let the other half of her soul suffer and die.

The Jedi were responsible for all of her pain, she realized, sitting up and looking wildly around the bedroom as though expecting Luke’s ghost to materialize and attempt to defend them.

Nothing happened.

He didn’t appear and no shifting Force ripples made his presence known. Perhaps he was afraid to face her now that she had begun to figure out the truth.

Ben had been right all along about them and their principles.

She pulled his sweater out from beneath her pillow and slipped it on over her head. It hung loosely from her smaller frame, reaching nearly to her knees as the sleeves flapped well past the tips of her fingers, but she was comforted by its proximity.

She wrapped herself in what remained of him as she pondered what to do next. After a few moments, her breathing began to settle and her body relaxed slightly.

Was she only imagining it, or did the pain radiating from their severed bond lessen somewhat as she settled into something that had been his, something that still carried faint hints of his energy and his scent?

She was being torn apart. She could not return to the Resistance and the Jedi cause without answers and she needed some way to cope with the ever-growing pain that radiated from the wound that their bond had caused in the Force.

Her mind skipped to the last place that she had seen him, the place where he had held her and kissed her, and she had known what it felt like to be loved.

It was also the last stronghold of the Sith. If there was anywhere in the galaxy that would have answers about the treachery of the Jedi, it would be there.

She would go to Exegol.


	3. Return to Exegol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loving you forever, can't be wrong  
> Even though you're not here, won't move on  
> Ah, that's how we play it- Dark Paradise, Lana Del Rey

Dust billowed around the Falcon as she set it down in the space port in Mos Eisley.

Curious eyes followed her as she walked down the ramp still wearing nothing but Ben’s sweater, but no one said a word about her strange attire or the saber she was clutching in her hand.

It was a filthy dump, but no one here was likely to ask any questions and a few credits tossed to an attendant was enough to ensure that she had fuel.

She told the nearest droid that she’s be back soon and walked out into the street. Everything was still and quiet at this time of day when the twin suns burned down from directly overhead and the heat was nearly intolerable. The sand burned beneath her feet, but she welcomed it, pulling on the pain to drive her determination.

Her gaze scanned the town’s rundown buildings. She took careful note of the skulking figures hiding in doorways as they watched the new arrival carefully, looking for signs of weakness or anything of value that they might be able to steal.

It wasn’t Niima Outpost, but it was still a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

She wouldn’t be here at all if there had been any choice. She wanted to be on Exegol already and rage still hummed just below her skin, looking for a target, a reason, any excuse at all to lash out. She wanted to everyone to hurt as deeply as she hurt.

The figures scattered deeper into the shadows as she padded her way down the street, looking around and squinting into the sunlight to read the names scrawled in sloppy Basic on the front of each store.

She was going to need food. She wasn’t sure how long she was going to remain on Exegol, and she couldn’t count on finding nourishment there.

There was really only one store that looked promising, and even it looked horribly run down and dirty. The bright sunshine hid no flaws, serving instead to only highlight the age and neglect of the sand scrubbed exterior. The sign promised food and supplies, and though it wasn’t likely that they would have much more than a few dehydrated portions, she had lived on that before and she could do so again.

After a few rapid blinks, her eyes adjusted the dimly lit interior of the store, revealing only shelves filled with dust covered wares and an old droid working behind the counter. It didn’t acknowledge her presence until she piled every portion she could find in front of him.

“Long trip?” it inquired.

“Maybe,” she answered vaguely as she took the sack that it had shoved her purchases in and headed toward the door.

Her eyes didn’t adjust to the blaze of sunlight quickly enough, and a hand had snaked around her arm before she registered the threat that awaited her.

She had been distracted, too wrapped up in her own pain to pay attention to anything else in the Force, but she could feel it now. Four life signatures that had been waiting to ambush her as she stepped back into the light.

She whipped her head around to face the one that had a vice like grip on her arm. He was dirty and dressed in several layers of sand encrusted stained clothing. Brown cloth was wrapped around his face, protecting his mouth and nose from the dust swirling in the air, but his eyes looked human.

A quick glance at the others told her they were native sand people. An unusual combination, since planet natives didn’t usually associate with drifters. They must have made some sort of agreement, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the details.

They told her anyway.

“There you are, pretty lady,” the human drawled as his eyes roamed lewdly over her bare legs and feet. His voice made her skin crawl. “We’ve been watching you since you dropped that ancient heap of a freighter down in the desert. You spent a long time poking around that old homestead. Mean something to you?”

She ignored his question, tipping her head to look pointedly down at his fingers as they dug painfully into her flesh. “You are going to get one chance to let go of my arm and walk away.”

They all laughed. Well, the human laughed, and the others made a horrible noise that she was sure was their species’ version of laughter, and none of them noticed her hand pulling her lightsaber out of the sack she carried.

“I don’t think that’s gonna happen sweetheart. I’m gonna take that ship off your hands, and my friends here are gonna take you.” He leaned in close enough that she could smell the foulness of his breath and whispered, “I’ve seen what the Tusken Raiders do to captives. You won’t last a month, and by the time they’re done with you, you’ll be begging for death.”

The raiders were dead before the sack hit the floor.

The lightsaber ignited with a slide of the switch beneath her thumb, casting a happy yellow glow as it severed three heads in one smooth motion.

The human turned to run, tripping over the rolling head of one of his companions, but Rey’s arm whipped out. He froze in place, muscles straining desperately against the invisible bonds he couldn’t see.

His eyes rolled in his head when Rey stepped in front of him, clucking her tongue disapprovingly. “Where are you going, sweetheart?” she crooned. “It’s rude to leave in the middle of a conversation.”

He whimpered, unable to speak as she held him motionless, lifting him to dangle in the air.

“You were going to hand me off to them,” she said accusingly. “How many others have you done that to? How many other women and children have ended up being torn apart because of your selfishness? The answer is too many,” she said, knowing he couldn't speak but feeling the truth of her speculation in the Force.

She bit down on her bottom lip, pacing a short path in front of him as she considered his fate.

“Killing you wouldn’t be a very Jedi thing to do, now would it? But if I leave you alive, others are going to continue to suffer at your hands. What to do, what to do…” She tapped a finger against her lips as she thought through the implications.

The sound of his neck snapping accompanied a sudden and violent explosion of energy in the Force.

“That was louder than I expected,” she muttered to herself, stepping over him and retrieving the bag of portions that she had dropped. She kicked a severed head out of the way with her bare foot as she walked by on her way back to the Falcon.

She was ready to leave and glad that she didn’t have to deal with any more disgusting Tattoine lifeforms.

BB-8 beeped at her sadly when she sat back down in the pilot’s chair, and she realized he had been watching the events on the street unfold from the viewport. She could see the bodies sprawled in the dirt at the other end of town.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” she assured him. “I took care of it.”

He rolled away and she didn’t see him again until she set the Falcon down on Exegol. The small droid seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when she commanded him to stay on the ship.

There were fallen star destroyers littering the barren landscape, but nothing living moved on the surface as she assessed her surroundings.

She turned her face away from the TIE fighter, still waiting in the same place it had been the last time she had seen it. Like her, it seemed eerie and empty without Ben.

Blue lightening cracked across the sky as she marched resolutely toward the entrance to the Sith temple. There was dark energy here, and unlike the last time she made this walk, it seemed more comforting than menacing. She pulled it in, wrapped it around her and let it give her strength. The pain that had become her constant companion diminished.

She had begun to discover that everything that brought her closer to Ben eased her pain. This place held the last fading traces of his signature in the Force, and he had spent almost his whole life with the dark side as his intimate companion. Now that same darkness was recognizing his signature in her, it was snaking its way up the tattered threads of their bond and finding a new home in the other half of his soul.

It felt comforting and familiar, like something that she had known all of her life.

Thousands of voices whispered to her, promising that it would have welcomed her without question when Ben was alive, fueling the potential of their power together and never making them chose between duty and each other. It would never have taken him from her, and it would have given the strength to ensure the treacherous Jedi didn’t either.

Power pulsed in the air as the platform descended, and the strength of it pooled into her. Her heart raced but she wasn’t afraid this time. It was almost like coming home, not to a place, but to a feeling.

It shared the same hunger, the same rage, the same burning desire for retribution.

Generations of Sith watched her with stone faces as she passed their statues in the corridor. She hadn’t noticed them before, not really, she had been too focused on confronting Palpatine and then the loss of Ben.

Now, they waited in silent anticipation as she walked deeper into their lair, trailing her fingers over the bases at their feet and reading names that she didn’t recognize.

Darth Nihilus… Darth Revan… Darth Bane

She trembled as she came to the last and tipped her back to look up into the dark at his face. Darth Sidious, her grandfather. The legacy she had rejected. If she had taken Kylo’s hand sooner, they would have taken him down together and erected their own statues.

What names would they have taken as they sat on the Sith throne? She could almost hear his voice in her mind, _Let old things die._ He would have remained Kylo Ren.

He would have remodeled the Sith cult to suit his own ends, and his would have been the first in a long line of statues that carried the title _Ren_ instead of _Darth_.

How many generations of the his new order would have lined this walkway? How long before those named after Kylo Ren inspired more fear than the Sith who lent their titles to Darth Sidious? All he would have had to do was take the Sith’s knowledge of the dark side and use it for his own purposes.

She turned a corner, eyes roving over the darkened cloning tanks that must have once been used to create a new body for Darth Sidious. The Sith knew about many things, unnatural things, things that even let someone cheat death.

The room held several tanks, all apparently drained of fluid and quickly abandoned. Most carried the shriveled remains of whatever poor creature had once been growing inside. Everything else had been taken, the tables cleared of whatever technology had once supported the operation.

The air hung heavy and nauseating with echoes of dark Force energy, and she remembered what the Resistance had once speculated that Palpatine had returned with cloning and dark magic that only the Sith knew. It seemed they had been right.

The thought that those secrets might be able to bring Ben back to her was a tempting one, but whoever had worked in this room had apparently been killed or fled and were now unable to help her.

An image of Palpatine’s rotting fingers and protruding bones flashed through her mind. It was probably for the best that the cultists had gone and taken that knowledge with them. She didn’t want that kind of life for Ben.

The whispered voices returned, and with it a tug in the Force. It was similar to what she had experienced in Ahch-to when she had been drawn to the Jedi library and the sea cave, but much stronger and more powerful.

“It wants to show me something,” she muttered, stumbling as her bare feet scrambled over the bits of broken stone that now littered the floor as she approached the throne room.

She could sense him, now, that last bit of his energy in the place where he had fallen. She fell to her knees beside the tattered remains of his clothing. She had taken the sweater but left the pants and the boots to gather dust in the darkness.

It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, her friends had needed her help, but she should have come back sooner to retrieve them, or to bury them properly.

She sat down and pulled it all into her lap, sobbing out her frustration in great gulps that echoed endlessly in the shattered remains of the once great hall.

When she had cried until her body ached and her tears refused to fall, she made a pile of broken stone in the corner, a makeshift grave with the words BEN SOLO burned into the rock with the tip of her saber.

For a moment, she was just a hollow vessel- a shell of a woman standing in the dark wearing a black sweater.

Then she heard it call to her. Her name repeated a thousand times as the voices promised that they could fix her pain.

_Rey_

_We can fix it_

_Bring him back to you_

_Rey_

_We know the way_

_The Sith have all the power_

_The Force shall set you free_

_Rey_

_The Jedi lied to you_

_You know they did_

_They lied_

_They lied_

_They lied_

She sprinted after them, tripping down stairwells and sliding down pitch-black hallways that twisted and turned as they carried her further underground. Her head ached and her lungs burned, but she wanted it, wanted the hope that the voices provided her.

They said they could bring him back- a feat that she had believed to be impossible. Maybe it was, or maybe it should be, but she no longer cared about what was right or natural or what it cost her. The price that she was willing to pay to see his face again was expensive.

She burst through a doorway and found herself in an empty room, a dead end, and her heart sank. Had it all been just a savage trick of the Sith? A trap to lure her down into the planet’s depths where she would never be able to find her way out?

The pain of disappointment weighed heavily on her already shattered heart as she turned back the way she had come, but before she could leave a faint red glow began to creep across the ground. It spread quickly, illuminating the room around her. The walls were carved of black stone, every inch of which was covered in unreadable runes that she suspected were Sith writing. A language that that now held secrets no one had the knowledge to unlock.

Her eyes fell on the source of the light, a pyramid of dark metal and glass that glowed from within. It radiated waves of sickly energy into the room, apparently activated by the proximity of a Force sensitive being.

This was what the voices had led her to, what they wanted to show her. Fear coated her skin in sweat and her throat in bile, but nothing would stop her if it might lead her to Ben.

When she wrapped her hand around it, pain tore through her, ripping a scream from her throat. She fell to the ground, the pyramid still clutched in her fist as a vision seared itself into her mind.

A handsome young man in Jedi robes was kissing a woman with long dark hair, his hand resting on her stomach, which was heavy with child. They looked happy and very much in love, but she caught only a glimpse before the woman was swallowed in flames, screaming in agony as the man tried in vain to save her.

"Padme!"

He fell to his knees beside her, weeping openly over her body, and when he looked up again his face was no longer that of a man. The black helmet that stared up at her was emotionless, but familiar. She had seen that helmet before on a pedestal in Ben’s bedroom on board the _Steadfast._

The sound of mechanical breathing filled her ears as she recognized what was once the most feared man in the Empire, Darth Vader.

She stumbled back, terrified, as he ignited a red lightsaber, but he seemed not to see her at all. Instead he cut his way through a group of workers and Imperial officers. She looked around, surprised to find herself standing on a barren planet. Red hot lava poured up through cracks in the surface, and everything around her ached with echoes of loss and pain.

“A worthy demonstration of anger, my young apprentice,” said a voice behind her that made her blood run cold. She turned to find Darth Sidious in a black robe, his face covered by a hood as he examined the carnage Vader had left in his wake.

“They failed,” Vader said calmly. “The design didn’t work.”

“So, you still think that you can find a way to bring her back?” There was little interest in Sidious’ tone, but she could feel his desire in the Force. So could Vader, though he chose not to acknowledge it.

“Yes, we’re getting closer. If I can open a portal to the World Between Worlds, I can find her. I can save her.” 

“Interesting. Don’t spend too much more time on Mustafar, I need you,” Sidious turned and walked away, leaving his apprentice standing in the shadow of a tall dark building.

The ground beneath her feet disintegrated and she fell, the vision dropping away and leaving her writhing on the floor in agony. The dark side has knowledge, but it always comes at a price.

It was several minutes before the pain receded enough for her think clearly, and when it did, she left the room with the glowing pyramid in hand. Vader had tried to bring someone back from the dead on Mustafar. He had almost succeeded.

That must be why this knowledge had been tucked away so far beneath the planet’s surface. Sidious had been trying to figure out how to use it, a backup plan of resurrection to be used if his clone body failed him.

Instead, it would go for a far better use. She was going to take back what belonged to her, what the Jedi had stolen from her. She was going to defy death and take back Ben Solo.

When she left Exegol behind her, she did so in a TIE fighter.


	4. Supreme Leader

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And there's no remedy for memory your face  
> Is like a melody, it won't leave my head- Dark Paradise, Lana del Rey

The old TIE screamed as she set it down on the ruins of the Death Star.

Nothing had changed on Kef Bir in the months since she had settled herself into the pilot’s seat of Ben own TIE Whispr and left him here, soaking wet and staring at her in wonder after she had healed the mortal wound that she had given him with her own hand and his own spitting red blade.

The wind still whipped the waves into a towering frenzy and the Death Star still echoed with the tendrils of dark side energy that wrapped around it, corrupting the sky and the sea in equal measure.

She curled her toes against the cold metal, slippery beneath her feet as she walked to the place where she had poured her own essence into him, not yet knowing that she was handing him the instructions for how to trade one person’s life for another’s- and how the decision he would make with that information would leave her feeling broken and hollowed out and guilty.

The ghost of his presence still lingered here, the shock and the sudden upwelling of love that she had been too blind to see. The Jedi had put too much fear into her for her to recognize anything beyond it.

Fear of him and fear of herself.

If she had waited for Ben to get past his initial surprise instead of running off to exile herself on Exegol…things would have been different. It was just another layer of failure that she could lay at Luke Skywalker’s feet.

Why hadn’t he bothered to tell her that Ben had turned? That she could have waited for him? The rage that betrayal burned away the cold she felt and left only determination in its wake.

She had come here for a reason, a mission to collect every bit of him that she could find and use it help seal up the wound in her soul until she could bring him back and she was certain that he had left an important bit of himself here.

The TIE that Ben had taken to Exegol, which had to have come from here, had been empty when she searched it, as had the hallways and surface of Exegol. Ben’s saber had been with him on the Death Star, but it didn’t seem to have been with him at any point after, or she would have found it. He must have left it here, somewhere.

She turned, scanning the broken bits of rusting metal with practiced eyes, and feeling her surroundings with the Force- looking for the familiar dull glint of black metal or the subtle pulse of energy from his kyber crystal.

A thorough search of the Death Star's surface turned up nothing and she faced an unpleasant choice. She could search the bowels of the wreckage, hoping that he had dropped it as he searched for usable transport off the planet…or she could search the sea, where he might have thrown it in a fit of dramatic flair as he decided to give up everything on the dark side and come to rescue her from her grandfather.

She eyed the waves thoughtfully. If there was one thing that she had learned about the Skywalker family in general and her Ben in particular, it was that they had a deeply rooted need to be as dramatic as possible.

She reached out with the Force, concentrating as hard as she could on the memory of his saber, the feel of it in her hand the energy from the crystal mingled with her own. She took a deep breath and jumped, flinging herself in a high arc off the Death Star wreckage and into the waves below.

The cold water opened to welcome her as she plunged headfirst into the salty embrace of the sea. It sucked her down, into the inky blackness, and tumbled her ruthlessly head over feet, twisting and turning her as the current pulled her further away from the submerged metal.

She could feel the rush of the current as it snaked its way through her hair and over her bare legs and feet, moving over her almost like a violent lover that had claimed her for its own. Whispers from the Death Star, urging her to let go and join it in its slow descent into rot and oblivion, echoed in her ears.

The blood was pounding in her head and the breath in her lungs was burning to be free when she felt it suddenly in the water…a familiar energy pulsing weakly into the Force. She kicked her legs, clawing at the blackness in her front of her as she fought against the brutal tug of the current as it tried to pull her away.

Her thoughts had gone blurry at the edges by the time her fingers closed around the metal cylinder, more than half buried in sand she couldn’t see. She twisted, braced her feet against the sea floor, and pressed up as hard as she could, kicking her way toward the surface as she used the Force to boost her efforts.

The distance between her and the surface passed by in a blur as the light above her grew gradually brighter, her head breaking the surface just as her lungs overrode her will power. She sucked in a welcome breath, but her reprieve was cruelly brief- cut short as a wave crashed down on her from above and pushed her back under.

There was no way to see which way she needed to swim, not with the waves coming so fast and giving her no time to do more than gasp for a quick breath each time she broke the surface, so she reached out for the sickly energy of the Death Star and swam toward it blindly, her hand closed greedily around the saber even though it slowed her down.

Her arms were soon screaming from the effort, and even the Force was not enough to pull her closer to her goal. She sagged beneath the water as it tugged at her feet, the weight of defeat heavy in her mind.

She had failed him, and while she might once have believed that the Force would be kind enough to bring them back to one another in death, she had lost even that small bit of faith.

The next wave crashed her mercilessly against the sharp metal of the wreckage, the sea spitting her out for a moment even as a line of waves poised themselves to yank her back in, but she managed to wrap one arm around a protruding pipe, clinging to it as the water swept away and gave her a precious few seconds to climb before the next wave crashed over her.

At least now she could breathe.

It took hours to climb up one handed, the work exhausting as she scrambled up the side in between waves that threatened to pull her back under to a watery grave, and night had fallen by the time she collapsed into the relative warmth of cockpit of the TIE with his saber in her hand.

Her fingers and toes were blue, and she was shaking so hard that she dropped his saber on the floor beside her feet, but she didn’t have the energy left to tend to any of that tonight. The sea hadn’t claimed her, and she had found what she came for.

She fell into a sleep that was blessedly dreamless and awoke in the morning to a body that was bleeding and sore.

Her feet and hands were a mess of cuts and bruises from the climb and she had a long slice on her right shoulder from slamming into the wreckage.

Luckily, the Empire had stocked all of their ships with an emergency medical kit, including small fighters like this one, and the bacta spray was fully intact. It was a hard twist to reach the wound on her shoulder, but after a few minutes of struggling she was feeling better enough to contemplate her next move.

Her options were limited, but there was nothing she wouldn’t do to bring him back to her.

***

Finding the First Order was nearly as challenging as hiding from them had once been.

There had been rumors that the remnants of their fleet had fled to the outer rim, but no one was certain exactly where they had gone. Rather than spend months searching the galaxy for them, she turned on the emergency beacon in her TIE and set it to all frequencies that had been known to be used by the First Order or the Empire. If they were looking for survivors or stragglers, _they_ would find _her_.

It only took two standard cycles for a band of pilots in newer TIE fighters to surround her and begin barking questions through the comm system.

“I will not identify myself. I have information to share with the leadership of the First Order. Take me to them,” she insisted.

“Are you from the Resistance?”

“I am from the newly reestablished Republic, you’re the one on the run now, remember?”

There was a long minute of silence.

“Follow me,” the pilot instructed.

Ben’s ship, the _Steadfast,_ was among the small fleet hovering over the long-abandoned ice planet of Hoth, and they landed in the same hangar bay where she had once confronted the Supreme Leader about Palpatine as they hovered over a different frozen planet.

She looked around at the hangar, noting that once again nothing seemed to have changed since Ben’s death except the hole inside of her. It looked exactly the same as it had when she had learned that the most hated man in the galaxy was her grandfather and that he had ordered the murder of her parents.

For some reason, she had hated Ben for telling her, almost as much as she had hated Palpatine for doing it, when she should have hated Luke and Leia for _not_ telling her or hated her parents for selling her into slavery as the only weak ill conceived plan they could come up with to keep her from his clutches.

Thankfully, she understood everything much better now, and she had her anger fixed on the people who actually deserved it.

She slid the cockpit open and climbed down as a group of stormtroopers rushed in from all sides, blasters aimed and ready to fire. She leaned back against the TIE, legs crossed casually at the ankles, and waited.

Two officers approached her, looking over her wild sea swept hair and the bloody tattered sweater that barely covered her thighs with nearly identical sneers of derision.

“This is supposed to be a Resistance informant?” asked the older officer loudly. “She looks like a mad woman... _she’s not even wearing any shoes_.”

The other didn’t bother to respond as he turned his attention to her and finally noticed the blaster that she had clutched in one hand. “Surrender your weapon,” he commanded.

She eyed the storm troopers behind him. She might be able to convince them to follow her, but it would mean revealing more about her identity than she had hoped to do so soon.

Still, it seemed that she had little choice if she wanted to get to the bridge without sacrificing lives that might be useful to her later. Having made her choice, she waved her hand, sending a surge of energy out into the Force. It wasn’t enough to overrule their will, not when there were so many, but it was enough to open their minds to her message.

“How many of your brothers and sisters have you lost in this war since Exegol? I can help you win. I can keep you alive. All you have to do is drop your weapons and take me to your leadership.”

They hesitated, but one by one they lowered their blasters.

“Stop it, you cowards,” the older officer screamed, clearly recognizing her now and shoving the nearest trooper back several feet in his rage. “You don’t know anything about this woman. She’s the Jedi scum that…”

She reached out with the Force, gripping his throat, and watching dispassionately as he struggled to breathe.

The other officer looked at her with apprehension, wisely choosing to pay no attention to his companion’s distress. “You are the one that Supreme Leader Ren was so determined to find, and now it seems that you have found us instead. My apologies for not noticing it sooner, you look different than you did the last time you were aboard.”

“I am different. Your leadership, please…?”

“Lieutenant Mitaka,” he supplied helpfully. “I am sure everyone on the bridge is going to be curious about what brings you to us.”

“I’m sure they are.”

The stormtroopers followed as she stepped over the body of the older officer, his eyes now open and staring, to follow Lt. Mitaka from the hangar.

Every eye turned when they reached the bridge, and Rey stared at each officer in turn, searching their minds for some sign of recognition or challenge but finding none.

“Who is in charge here?” she questioned. “I have information about the Republic.”

A heavyset man with white hair stepped forward, looking her over in disbelief. “Information about the Republic? You hardly look to be the type to be aware of your own name.”

“I’m aware of a great deal more than it would appear. I demand to speak to the new leadership of the First Order.”

“Who are you?” he asked, the condescension clear in his tone.

Possible answers spun through her mind. A scavenger. A Jedi. A member of the Resistance. The one who took down Palpatine and broadcast the markers that led the galaxy to Exegol to destroy the Final Order.

But none of those things were why she had come.

The image of her hand clutching Ben’s flashed through her mind. They were a dyad and she had taken his hand, after all. “I am Supreme Leader Kylo Ren’s wife and I am here to defeat the Resistance and return control of the galaxy to the First Order. I’m in charge now.”

There was a rumble of laughter before the man spoke again. “Kylo Ren had no wife, and even if he had, that would mean nothing. His position has been taken by the next in line for command.”

“Oh? Who is that? You?”

She sensed the truth of it before the question finished leaving her lips. This pompous arrogant man thought that he deserved to stand where Kylo Ren had stood, to take his title, to run his organization into the ground. 

She silenced his answer with a flick of her hand, throwing him viciously against the ceiling and leaving him there to gasp and gurgle as his life slowly drained away.

“Before you answer my next question, please consider that I am willing to kill every officer on this bridge. Who’s next in line to be in charge?”

A chorus of voices responded in unison, “You are, and long live the Supreme Leader.”

“That’s better,” she announced. “I’ll need someone to inform me about our plans to recapture the galaxy. Mustafar is under the control of the newest Republic, is it not?”

***

Several hours later she had made her goals clear to the remaining officers. They were to retake the galaxy, beginning with the portions that she personally needed.

New ships were to be brought in from the shipyards in the Unknown Regions, new recruits conscripted to replace the fallen troopers. They need too many now to continue to rely entirely on Hux’s program of raising them from birth to ensure their loyalty, but there were plenty of men in the Outer Rim willing to do anything for a decent meal.

They were untrained, but they would make acceptable bodies to fill the ranks for now.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” she said, standing at the end of the meeting and dismissing the others to return to their duties. “Could you have someone show me to my chambers?”

“Of course, Supreme Leader…?”

“Supreme Leader Ren will suffice. I believe my husband left all of his things on board, did he not? I assume they are still here somewhere, and I would like them returned to me.”

“Nothing of Supreme Leader Ren’s has been moved from his chambers, everyone aboard was too afraid to move them in case he ever returned,” Mitaka explained. “Will he? Return?”

“Yes,” Rey said firmly, her tone making it clear that she would allow no further questions. “I am going to make sure of it.”

His chambers, too, were exactly as she remembered them. Pristine white walls, devoid of any personal touches except the mask of Darth Vader resting on a pedestal. He must have had it brought back up from the surface of Kijimi after it had passed through their bond to land at his feet.

She found that they had already brought all of her own personal items from the TIE fighter and laid them on the shelf where she had once found a Sith dagger and Chewie’s belongings, and she picked up the Sith holocron and moved it to rest beside Vader’s helmet.

Now the stand was no longer the shrine of a boy obsessed with family legacy, it was the promise of a woman to succeed where Vader had failed, to bring back the person that mattered most in life.

She felt a twinge of guilt over her betrayal of the Resistance, but she shoved it down under the hurt that she had lived with since Ben died. She had considered going to them when she left Kef Bir, but she knew them, all of them, too well.

They would never have supported her in trying to bring Ben back. It was unnatural and, probably more importantly in their minds, they hated him even as they benefitted from his sacrifice. Unfortunately for them, she was not prepared to accept that decision. They had not lived through her pain, and they had no right to prevent her from doing whatever she could to bring an end to it.

Curiosity soon drove her up the stairs, where she found a bed and a sliding panel that opened to reveal rows of black tunics, capes, and boots. She ran her fingers over the fabric, pressing it to her face and finding that it still carried a hint of his scent.

The next button that she pushed opened a smaller compartment that contained a single item- a black helmet, crisscrossed with glowing red lines.

She settled the helmet onto her head, sliding it closed with a click. She was surrounded by darkness and the echoing sound of her own breathing- a stark reminder that she lived while he did not- but it provided her with the necessary certainty that with every step she took closer to where he had been in life, she was better able to feel his presence even in death.


	5. Surrendered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Your soul is hunting me and telling me  
> That everything is fine  
> But I wish I was dead- Dark Paradise, Lana del Rey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My allergies have been bad enough this week to put me a little behind on updating, but instead of skipping an update entirely, I decided to just do a shorter chapter to give a glimpse of how Rey and the Resistance are doing with everything that has already changed. Next week's update should be a bit more impactful, thanks for having patience with me and for all the support so far!

Rose shivered and wiggled deeper into her coat, searching the barren snow-covered landscape for signs of movement. She’d lost the ability to properly feel her fingers not long after she started her turn on perimeter patrol and she desperately missed the warmth of Ajan Kloss.

This was the third base in as many months and it was a miserable place, hastily chosen out of few remaining options. They had been on the run since the First Order had experienced a sudden and unexpected resurgence in power and emerged from hiding amid rumors of a new and vicious Supreme Leader. 

The Resistance had managed only one successful battle since then, and the cost of that victory had been high. Whoever their new leadership was, they had not taken the defeat lightly.

The fleet had emerged in the skies above Ajan Kloss mere hours later, leaving them all stunned and terrified as they scrambled to a hasty evacuation- though not hasty enough to avoid heavy losses.

Since then they had lost all of the progress they had made during the months after Exegol, system after system once again falling under the control of the enemy, and the mystery of how their bases were being discovered so quickly had still not been solved.

She turned her head quickly at the sound of snow crunching in the distance, but relaxed when she spotted a familiar face.

“Hey,” Finn called, trudging toward her through the knee high drifts and clapping her enthusiastically on the shoulder when he finally managed to get within arm's reach. “How’s the patrol going?”

She eyed him skeptically, a coiled knot of annoyance in her stomach that had been tightening for weeks now. “Uneventful,” she said shortly, “There’s not much to see here. Just cold and snow.” He laughed as though she had something funny, and she shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “Can I help you with something?”

He shrugged. “I just wanted to check on you, make sure you were ok out here.” He was gazing at her intently enough to have her baring her teeth in a not quite friendly smile.

“You’ve been doing a lot of checking up lately…since Jannah left,” she said pointedly.

“Yeah…I mean…” he stumbled over the thought, suddenly aware of the glint in her eye.

“You mean you just wanted to ‘be friends’, and by that I mean ignore me entirely, until the person you were actually interested in took off with Lando, and now suddenly you care about how I am?”

“It’s not like that…” he began, but she cut him off with an impatient huff of breath that hung in the cold air between them like smoke.

“You didn’t care how I was for a whole year, Finn. You barely spoke to me at all once you didn’t need my plan to help save Rey anymore. I wasn’t good enough for you to even talk to me, was I? I was just a useless mechanic- not a Jedi or a flashy pilot or a runaway stormtrooper. We weren’t friends. We’re _not_ friends. We will _never_ be more than friends.”

He puffed out his chest indignantly. “I am a general of the Resistance, it's my job to look after…”

“You’re a moof milker, _General.”_

She left him standing in the snow with his mouth hanging open and wished fervently for the hundredth time that Rey hadn’t disappeared. She missed her friend, and she missed Rey’s unerring ability to manage difficult relationships and difficult people.

If she’d been around to talk some sense into him, Finn probably wouldn’t have stuck his foot in his mouth so spectacularly.

They were all falling apart- personally and professionally. Things had never been this difficult for them-not even after the Battle of Crait had the situation felt this hopeless. Without Rey and without Leia, much of the hope and the positivity had been sucked out of the Resistance.

Kaydel had remained the only truly bright spot for Rose during the the past few months of turmoil, and she had come to depend on her heavily since Rey had left. They were both afraid of the First Order’s sudden violent reemergence and taking what comfort they could in each other. There was little faith left that they were going to survive, despite Finn and Poe's rush to organize a defense. There just didn’t seem to be anything that could hold out against the increased ruthlessness and brutality that they were facing.

Something in the First Order had definitely changed, and unless they figured out what that was, they were all doomed.

***

The sound of heavy boots echoed down the corridor, sending a frisson of fear down the spine of everyone within earshot. They scrambled to their places, determined to look busy, productive, and serious.

There was no room for error, not around Supreme Leader Ren.

They had served under the carefully crafted web of Snoke’s leadership, and the volatile fury of Kylo’s, but nothing had prepared them for _her_.

She was cold, calculating, and ruthless in between bouts of rage that shook the floor beneath their feet and caused dangerous cracks to appear in the transperisteel. Some whispered about dark magic and others about the Force, but they all knew there was something not quite alive beneath the helmet she wore.

It had once been Kylo’s, but that didn’t make it any more familiar or any less terrifying. If anything, it was _worse_ to see how much different it looked on her than it had on him. The glowing red cracks of the Sith metalwork had taken on an otherworldly gleam when she had placed it on her own head, like somehow her darkness was more complete, more satisfying to the cursed thing than his had been.

She was certainly crueler than he had ever been, leaving a trial of bodies in her wake that made even the bravest and most ambitious of the officers hold their tongues in her presence, lest she rip them out with some invisible power and leave them gasping in agony on the floor.

Their only consolation in all of this terror was the simple effectiveness of her brutality. If she was cruel to them, she was a nightmare beyond fathoming to the rest of the galaxy. Her battle strategies were ruthless- take no prisoners, give no quarter.

Mercy and compassion were outside her comprehension.

They sighed in collective relief as she swept past without stopping- a dark wraith in black skirts and a swirling cape, a harbinger of death and destruction.

Rey sighed her own relief as the door to her chambers closed behind her and she slumped weakly against back against them, pulling intoxicating waves of dark energy into herself until she regained the strength to stand.

One more day behind her meant one day closer to healing the wounds inside her.

Each day now was a near endless stretch of intolerable pain and not even proximity to Ben’s possessions or his scent was enough to numb the ache. The ragged edges of the bond she had shared with him burned with agony that seeped into her mind even as she slept.

Even more upsetting was the that it had become very clear that the echoes of his life force were fading from this plane of existence- and with it her own essence had begun to ebb. It had been almost unnoticeable at first but was now worsening with each breath she took. She was getting physically weaker, forced to exist through sustaining and fueling herself with energy pulled from the dark side, until only her rage was able to keep her tethered to life.

It left little room for anything else. She had already begun to forget what she had once cared about, who she had once been. Her hatred for the Jedi and her determination to restore Ben’s life was all that remained, and though some deeply buried part of her was aware that this trade had cost her most of her sanity, it seemed a fair enough price to pay. Without the dark side, she’d be dead. With it…she was nearly invincible, a fact that suited her purposes just fine.

The galaxy was already quaking in terror, and she had not yet even truly begun. There were lessons that her citizens needed to learn about selfishness and the glorification of the wrong people. She was going to teach them those lessons in fire and blood, until they all hated the Jedi as much she did, for taking away her hope and creating this monster inside her.

She pushed the botton to release her helmet and the locking mechanism slid open with a now intimately familiar click. It gleamed unnaturally as she placed it on the shelf, and she couldn’t quite repress a chuckle at how much she had once despised something that now brought her so much comfort. The kriffing thing was so connected to her, constantly feeding off of her pain, that it was nearly a part of her now.

She had followed in the Skywalker footsteps in more ways than one, mimicking Ben as he had mimicked Vader.

The red grew brighter as anger surged through her. For all of her success, they had yet to take Mustafar- the one place that she truly needed to have. It was the place Darth Vader had kept his secrets and an essential part of her plan to being Ben back.

The galaxy was worthless without that planet.

She slammed the button and the panel covering the mask slid closed, hiding the iridescent red lines from view as she stalked furiously across the room, stripping her cloak and gloves as she went. Everything on the tables rattled as she walked by, and she flicked a gaze toward the sound with disinterest. It had been happening more and more often, even the smallest irritations were enough to cause a violent and distinct disturbances in the Force around her.

It was a small change that she considered a natural consequence of the dark energy that now flowed through her with every breath, but it wasn’t the only change she had noticed. A quick glance at her reflection in the viewport confirmed that her eyes were more yellow today than they had been the day before- her natural hazel slowly fading as the dark side of the Force kept her alive and supplied her with glorious power.

_The dark side is our nature, surrender to it_

His words rang in her mind, a hollow echo of a memory, but he had been so right.

She’d given everything she had to the light side and it had given her nothing. Once she had surrendered to the dark, it had given her everything. Power, authority, life for herself…and soon life for Ben.

True, it would have been simpler if she could have just died with him, and the constant pain often made her wish that was an option- she wanted to be dead most days- but she didn’t trust the Force to reunite them after everything it had done.

Resurrection was the only path, and now that she had fully embraced it she had no doubt that the darkness was going to take her there. It was only a matter of time.


	6. The Oracle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one compares to you  
> I'm scared that you won't be waiting on the other side

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of these chapters may be a bit shorter since I am trying to keep a fairly fast pace and not get bogged down in too much description. Hopefully it's still an enjoyable update.

Mustafar was hot- a torrid red and black hellscape where the air in her lungs burned from the dry heat and the smoke stung in her eyes even through her mask.

It was also abandoned, at least according to their scans. There was evidence of habitation, but the buildings were empty, apparently unoccupied for some time. A fact that seemed curious until several stormtroopers reported finding fields littered with long rotten corpses.

Blaster marks were evident on the bones and clothing of some of the bodies, but most of the others…

She kicked aside a decaying helmet with a long gash burned through the left side. Lightsaber wounds in destruction this recent meant only one thing…a visit from Supreme Leader Kylo Ren.

Ben had come here before her.

He must have wiped out the being who lived here, but what could he have been looking for? A way to resurrect Vader himself perhaps?

It seemed unlikely that he would have known that was a possibility, especially since she’d heard nothing about it from the First Order officers.

“General Hux,” she called, waiting with as much patience as she was able to muster for the red-haired officer to approach her cautiously.

He walked with a limp now and needed a cane to stand fully upright after the blaster wounds he had sustained, but he had been loyal enough over the past few months. His substantial knowledge of Ben had made him a favorite since she had stumbled upon the truth of his survival- and the subsequent time he had spent hiding inside First Order ships, his safety dependent on the loyalty of the stormtroopers he had trained after they rescued him from being tossed down a garbage chute. 

If Hux had reservations about her plans or her seemingly insane preoccupation with stepping into Kylo Ren’s life, he had wisely kept it to himself. His gratitude for being able to resume his life outside of hiding had been enough for him to overlook her eccentricities.

She had restored him to previous position of honor, after giving him a full explanation of events and doing a quick and painful search of his mind to convince her that his hatred of Kylo Ren was now a secondary concern to his hatred of everything associated with the Jedi and the Sith.

He had seen her truth, how his downfall could be laid at the feet of these two selfish warring factions, and she had benefitted immensely from his military prowess since.

He had won her Mustafar.

“When did he come here?” she asked quietly, when he stood beside her in his black greatcoat, a shiny black cane in his gloved hand that we was leaning on heavily.

Hux needed no further elaboration. “Before he discovered Exegol, Supreme Leader. He was determined the source of Palpatine’s transmission and discover the truth. He brought only a small group of soldiers and his two highest generals, myself included. He found something here, a map of some kind.”

“The wayfinder,” she muttered. “Anything else?”

Hux looked at her speculatively, obviously trying to decide if she would believe him. “We didn’t see much of it personally, he ordered everyone else to stay back, but there was…something in a bog near here.” He waved his hand to the right of where they were standing. “Ren seemed shaken when he returned and never spoke of what happened.”

“Let’s see if I can shake out whatever it was, then, shall we? Send out scouting parties to the search the ruins of the castle and the surrounding areas, make sure that whoever these people were, they’re all dead. We don’t need any unpleasant surprises.”

Hux nodded, calling out orders as Rey beckoned for her knights to follow her through the smoking trees.

Six helmeted figures cloaked in black moved stealthily behind her. The new Knights of Ren had been pulled from the stormtrooper program, hand chosen by Rey with advice from Hux. All women and all Force sensitive to some mild degree, they took their job of guarding her and carrying out her orders extremely seriously.

That was much to their benefit, she knew, because she had no reservations about separating their heads from their bodies if they didn’t. She had no intention of being betrayed as Ben had been on Exegol, and unflinching loyalty had been at the top of her list when considering the qualities of potential candidates with the general.

They walked until the ground beneath her boots became soft and spongy, each step a squelching slide as hot water squeezed its way up through the mud and soot.

“It must be close by,” Rey told them, “Stay here and wait for me.”

They obeyed without question, turning their backs to give her privacy as they watched for any sign of a threat to her safety.

When the bog, and the creature that waited within, came into view Rey watched it closely from beneath the confines of her mask. It was hideously ugly, a large bug like creature with six thin, brittle legs and a squishy body. It was perched menacingly on the fallen head of a large statue, the face of which was round and cherubic, a terrifying baby half drowned in the steaming, murky water.

The scene was macabre, disturbing in a way that caused even her skin to creep unpleasantly.

“What are you, foul creature?”

The bug blinked its bulbous eyes at her slowly. “I am the Oracle and I have been waiting for you. I have met one of your kind before, a man who wore your face.”

_Ben_

She opened the helmet with a click, tugging it off and bringing it rest at her hip. “You knew Kylo Ren?”

“I met a man who sought knowledge and power. I gave him what I was able to freely give, much of which was information about a young Jedi.”

She snarled, taking a step toward the water’s edge. “There are _no more_ Jedi.”

“Not now,” the creature agreed. “But then there was one who remained, a young woman who remained as Kylo Ren’s call to light. I told him as much when he came to seek my wisdom. I told him about the Dyad.”

“What you know about the Dyad?”

“I know that Kylo Ren, the young man born as Ben Solo, had the other half of you soul,” it said, ignoring her hiss of pain at the words. “I know that since he has been gone, everything about you is wrong and unnatural. You have become a pit of darkness, a deep vergence in the Force itself.”

The ground beneath her rumbled ominously and several nearby trees spilt as blue lightening erupted from the sky to dance down their trunks.

The creature remained undaunted, blinking at her again as she stood on the shore with her chest heaving in fury.

“It will only grow worse,” he assured her. “Without the other half of you, what you are will destroy us all. The darkness inside of you is greedy and all consuming, it will wrap its tendrils around the very fabric of our reality and drink it down whole.”

“Then save yourself, save _everything else_ , and tell me how to bring him back. Darth Vader knew it was possible. He was so close to success, tell me what to do.”

The creature tipped its head, pondering her words. “If I would not help Vader, why do you believe that I would help you? Yes, he worked very hard to open a door between the living and the dead, but this is a violation of the laws of nature, it is against the will of the Force itself.”

Rey laughed, cold and bitter, while the thing looked on dispassionately. “Is _this_ the will of the Force? For me to become the dark, all-consuming vergence that you warned me would destroy the galaxy? This is not balance, this is not natural, he was part of my soul!”

“I do not pretend to know the will of the Force, but I know that some things are eternal, and no one has the right to undo that which has been done. Perhaps the Force will your death as well.”

“I have no faith in the Force to bring me to him even in death. It has taken everything from me and you expect me to believe my death will change that?"

The bug looked at her silently, unwavering in its lack of information.

"You won’t help me?”

The Oracle shifted its many legs restlessly as the water around it began to bubble and froth, but it remained stubbornly mute.

The statue beneath it shattered, small pieces flying like shrapnel into the air as she drug the creature toward her across the surface of its boiling swampy home, the strength of her will in the Force immutable and inescapable.

It squawked only once when the red beam of an unstable saber flared to life in her hand and sank deep into its flesh.

Rey sniffed indignantly, stepping over the now limp spindles of its legs and settling the helmet back into place on her head. Vader had been weak to allow such an unhelpful creature to live for so long on his own planet.

That weakness was why he had failed. Vader had the light burning deep inside him and it had made him too soft to do what needed to be done.

Rey’s light had died, utterly and permanently extinguished, and it would allow her to succeed where he had failed.

“Search the castle,” she commanded her knights. “If there were useful Sith artifacts on Exegol, I’m sure Vader has some hidden here as well. Kylo got what he came here for and fled immediately for Exegol to confront Palpatine, I doubt he bothered to examine anything very closely.”

They turned as one toward the looming black structure perched high on the cliffs behind them, bones crunching under their heavy boots as they went.

She needed to find Hux, he was going to have to take over their plan recapture the galaxy so that she could focus on unlocking the mystery of Darth Vader’s near success in overcoming death. She wasn’t leaving this planet until she discovered everything it had to teach her.


	7. Hints and Visions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All my friends ask me why I stay strong  
> Tell 'em when you find true love it lives on  
> Ah, that's why I stay here- Lana del Rey, Dark Paradise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for letting me know how much you are enjoying Rey's journey through the dark side! I really like this version of her and I'm glad that so many of you think this would make sense for her after everything she went through in TROS. 
> 
> To be honest, I have most of this story loosely outlined, but I have no firmly fixed ending in mind. Would you like to see Light Side Reylo, Dark Side Reylo, or Balanced Grey Reylo as the endgame? I can't promise to end it a specific way based on the vote but I am very curious about your preferences and why you feel that way! Let me know in the comments?!

“That’s the Falcon!”

Rose winced at the volume of Poe’s shout in her ear, but she couldn’t blame him for his excitement. In the months since Rey’s disappearance, everything had been lost. It was nice to see that something had finally been found. The Resistance itself was now shattered, its members scattered to fend for themselves and find what safety they could across the galaxy. They had been driven from their frozen refuge not long after they arrived, and it had been the end of a formally organized Resistance.

Some individual systems had held on longer, driven by the stubbornness of their individual leadership, but that was rapidly fading as even the most resolute and independent corners of the galaxy fell to the unstoppable encroachment of the First Order.

There were only a four of them now, huddled on a small ship that they had sneakily borrowed with Poe’s handy hotwiring skills, as they landed on Exegol.

They had begun to search for Rey once the Resistance had broken apart, certain that their salvation must rest in her return, as their destruction had begun with her departure. Tracing her history for likely places. had led them to first search for signs of her Jakku and Takodana, both with no luck. Finn had suggested that they check Tattooine, since it had a connection to Leia and the Skywalkers. 

There they had found rumors, frightening ones, but no sign of Rey or the Falcon.

They’d moved on to Ahch-To, but there was no indication of any recent human inhabitation. Only crumbling stone buildings, a burned-out TIE Whispr, and several fishy looking caretakers that were complaining quite loudly to anyone who would listen about the events that had occurred since the first time _that woman_ had showed up. They seemed to view this newest visit by outsiders as the next in a long line or transgressions that they laid firmly at her feet.

She was destructive, they explained. Loud. Brash. Careless. Drawn to the dark side in ways they had never seen before in all their generations.

They all left shaking their heads in puzzlement- that wasn’t the Rey they knew. But then, neither was the woman seen murdering people on the streets of Mos Eisley. With a lightsaber.

Exegol had been their last hope, the only place left that they could think of to find her. If she wasn’t there, then she could be _anywhere._ It was a large galaxy and it was possible that she had already fallen victim to the First Order.

Spotting the Falcon was their first real, tangible clue.

“Why would she come back here?” Finn asked, giving voice to the question on everyone’s minds.

“I don’t know,” Rose said, her eyes searching the Falcon and the horizon for signs of movement, “but hopefully we can ask her.”

“Let’s just hope she’s on the Falcon, and we don’t have to go searching that Sith temple for her.” Finn shuddered. His Force sensitivity was not as well developed as it could have been, but a quick glance at his face, and the way his hands curled and flexed against his sides, was enough for Rose to know that he could feel the evil creeping up from beneath the surface.

“It is bad?” Kaydel asked from beside her.

“Yeah,” Finn breathed, “it’s so greedy but it offers so much…”

“We need to find Rey and get the hell out of here,” Poe said, setting the ship down beside the Falcon and turning from the viewport to give Finn a little shake. “Focus, buddy, we’ll leave as soon as we can.”

Finn nodded, turning his face reluctantly away from the view of the temple to follow the others out and onto the planet’s surface.

“Rey?” They all called her name as they walked around the outside of the Falcon, searching the horizon and watching the temple to see if anyone emerged.

“I don’t see her anywhere,” Rose shouted above the whipping wind. “Let’s check inside!”

Poe nodded and the Falcon door opened with a pressurized hiss. It was dark and quiet inside, no indications of movement or habitation here, either. They split up, Poe and Finn searching one side of the ship and Rose and Kaydel the other.

They found nothing but a small orange and white droid, settled into rest mode and waiting silently in the ship’s main cabin.

“BB-8!” A series of raid fire beeping responds as the droid’s lights flickered on and he looked around. Poe knelt in front of his best friend, rubbing his hands eagerly over the round surface of BB’s body in affection. “I can’t believe we found you! Are you, ok? Where’s Rey? Is she alright?”

The stunned amazement on Poe’s face, brought on by the sheer joy of finding a loved one he had feared might be forever lost, faded as he listened to the frantic beeps that relayed the story of everything that had happened since had left Ajan Kloss on the Falcon.

“What is it?” Kaydel asked. “What happened?”

Poe swallowed uncomfortably. “Rey did kill those people on Tattooine,” he said shortly.

“She did? Was she really walking the streets half naked? What is going on?” Finn’s voice was agitated, and they all knew that he didn’t like to think of Rey as capable of any wrongdoing, not really.

“Yeah, he said she was. Something happened on Tattooine that really must have upset her. BB-8 said she was acting very strangely- she was angry and crying for days. They left Tattooine and came here. She went inside the temple and when she came out she left on an old TIE fighter that was already here. Apparently, it had been abandoned on the surface, not sure where it came from.”

“Wait, she just…she just left?” Rose’s voice was trembling. It just didn’t make any sense. “When did she leave? Maybe we can still find her. If she left on a TIE fighter, maybe it was the one we saw on Ahch-to and those fish nuns were wrong about the last time she was there.”

Poe shook his head. “No, that was a new TIE, specialized tech. This was old…BB said it looked Imperial, not First Order.”

“We still might be able to track her down,” Finn began, but Poe cut him off.

“She’s been gone for months.”

“What?” The word echoed around the Falcon, three voices and three stunned faces stared back at Poe in disbelief.

“BB said they came here almost as soon as they left Ajan Kloss. The Falcon has been here almost the whole time she’s been gone.”

“Great,” Finn grumbled. “What do we do now?”

Poe stood, looking around dejectedly, and it hit Rose hard. That he didn’t have an answer to that question for the very first time.

“I’m not sure,” he said finally. “I know we all collectively agreed that those rumors of Supreme Leader Ren returning were some kind of First Order propaganda, but something just isn’t right. Maybe he did return, maybe he’s got her somehow.”

“We need answers,” Kaydel said hesitantly, and Rose reached for her hand, squeezing it firmly and trying to convey encouragement through her touch. “I think we can agree that Rey seems to be a core part of what is happening in the galaxy. We need to find her.”

“Don’t know where else to look,” Finn said. He narrowed his eyes at Rose holding Kaydel’s hand, but wisely said nothing. Rose had made it clear that his opinions on her romantic pairings were not welcome.

“Then we find someone to help us look,” Poe said slowly.

Ten minutes later, they had the Falcon’s communication systems up, and a faint connection established with Maz. The wizened old alien had returned to Takodona and taken Chewie with her. The wookie been wounded on a mission with Lando and needed time to recover. Rose also strongly suspected that he was just heartbroken from so much loss in such a short time, and needed to rest. They could see him in the background, complaining that Maz wouldn’t let him out of bed yet.

“I don’t know, kiddo. Finding one woman in a galaxy of this size is bound to be nearly impossible.”

“Not just a woman, Maz, a Jedi. There’s got to be someone that has knowledge of these things still left in the galaxy.” Poe was begging now, there was no mistaking the edge of whine in his voice and Maz sighed, considering the problem carefully.

“Well, there might be one person…”

“And?” Finn asked, pushing his way closer to the front of the group that was crammed into Falcon’s cockpit.

“She’s not going to be happy to see you,” Maz predicted. "Come here, and I'll go with you to find her. She might be more willing to help if you have a familiar face in the group.”

“Is she a Jedi?” Rose asked.

Maz shook her head and her eyes sparkled with amusement. “She’s no Jedi.”

***

The ground shook beneath her every step, sometimes leaving behind fissures of broken stone or patches of burnt ground. A physical reminder that the Force itself was no longer at rest in her presence.

Before it had been peaceful, with little stirrings like a gentle breeze in the summer sunshine. Now it was a maelstrom, and Rey the eye of the hurricane. She could feel it growing, larger and more powerful.

Her own lifeforce was now shrouded in a permanent cloud of dark energy that twisted and rolled within in her. She no longer had to reach for the life sustaining darkness, it existed within her- a deep well of inky blackness that fueled her hatred, her greed, her cruelty. It fed, in turn, on what was left of her hope, her love, her humanity.

As it consumed her, it began to feed what was around her, sucking the light out of everything that it touched- its reach was ever widening.

Few dared to get close enough to speak to her. Those who did were more likely to end up dead than not, and three of her knights had already been replaced. The first who were chosen had fallen dead at her feet for one perceived slight or another.

“What remains of those who resist our cause?” She stared down at Hux from behind the mask of a dead man. Vader’s castle on Mustafar was still in the process of recontruction, but the room she had chosen to house a large black throne was complete.

The area was cavernous, empty except for the two of them, and Hux trembled before her. She let the strength of his fear bleed into her through the Force and delighted in it. He had not trembled so before Snoke, or the man he had known as Kylo Ren.

She knew, because she had sunk her mind into his so deeply that she had taken everything, every secret he had ever possessed, and pulled it from while he screamed in agony.

No, Hux had never more loyal to anyone, which was all had that kept him alive for this long.

“None remain, Supreme Leader,” he assured her. “Individuals, perhaps. Groups not more than a few life forms in number, but nothing substantial. All systems have bowed to the First Order.”

“Hunt them down,” she instructed.

“Supreme Leader?”

“Hunt them down,” she repeated. “All of them. Let it be known that anyone suspected of dissention will face punishment. I will not tolerate such disrespect.”

“Yes, of…of course,” he coughed slightly, but his back remained straight, his eyes cold. “Anything else?”

“I need to know more of... certain knowledge kept by the Sith and the troublesome Jedi. There is more information out there that they have hidden away. I want every temple, every monument searched. Every wayfinder and holocron brought to me immediately. The same with the physical texts if there are any to be discovered.”

Hux was silent for a moment, and she could feel his fear jumping under his skin. His mind was tumbling, searching for something.

“Supreme Leader, most of the information you seek was destroyed during the Imperial Era, or lost long ago.” He sucked in a deep breath as the floor beneath his feet began to buck and the air around him crackled with tendrils of blue lightening. “However,” he continued quickly, “I know that we have recovered some things from the archives of the Empire.”

“Sith and Jedi knowledge?”

He breathed easier when the shaking stopped and she looked at him quizzically, a tip of her masked face the only visible indication that he should continue speaking.

“Yes, the previous Emperor was deeply interested in collecting that sort of knowledge. I can give access to anything that the First Order was able to recover.”

“That’s a good start, General Hux, but I need more. If Emperor Palpatine had discovered the information I seek, he would be the one sitting on this throne right now.”

“Ah, well…there was a deal in the archives about how to track down and discover Force sensitive beings. It seems that Palpatine and Darth Vader hunted the Jedi nearly to extinction, but perhaps they missed one? Someone who might know more about where to look for this information?”

“Find out,” she commanded, and he left, turning smartly on his heel and fleeing as fast his dignity would allow.

Rey sighed, stepping down from her throne and wandering to the single long window that overlooked the planet’s surface. She could see the bubbling waters where a fallen statue now sat, empty of its parasite. The body of the Oracle was a decaying blur from this height, but it brought her great satisfaction.

Foolish being. It had truly thought that she would be stopped in her quest. That the pool of horrible darkness spreading out from her could be avoided.

She was inevitable.

As was the reaching of her goal. She had poured over the Jedi texts, subjected herself again and again to the images trapped in that Sith monstrosity that she had taken from Exegol. The answers were so close, but just beyond her reach.

There was something, some connection that she could sense but not quite name. Hux would fix it. He would hunt down the missing pieces that would let her see the whole puzzle laid out before her.

Ben would return and he would join her. Surely, he would see how much she had sacrificed to restore him to the living world. He would accept her apology for pulling him into the light, and understand that though she had been wrong to deny him before, she had seen the truth.

He would retake the name Kylo Ren, and they would feast on the galaxy together.

“Don’t do this, Rey. Please don’t go this way.”

Her head snapped to the left, to find Ben standing next to her at the window. His black hair was blowing in the hot breeze and his eyes were sad.

She shook her head firmly.

He was wearing the black sweater that he had died in, the hole she had put there clearly visible. It was impossible, she knew that before she tried and failed to reach him through the Force, because that sweater was locked away in her chambers on the First Order ship that hovered just above the atmosphere of the planet.

“You’re not real,” she told him. Her modulated voice was flat, and he looked at her curiously, bringing his hand up to touch the cold metal that hid her face away.

“What are you doing? Hold on, Rey, don’t give in to this.”

Her anger bubbled, “You aren’t coming back, not unless I drag you back myself. It’s the only way.”

“Rey…”

“No!” The wall in front of her exploded with the force of her rage, sending rock tumbling down the side of the castle and down the cliffside.

The castle echoed with her screams, the evidence of a broken mind unable to handle the hallucinations it had conjured.


	8. The Truth Revealed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But there's no you, except in my dreams tonight  
> I don't wanna wake up from this tonight- Dark Paradise, Lana del Rey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry that this update took so long. School has started for me again and I am a little busier now. It's also hard for me to update this story in particular, because I have to be in the right mindset to do it well. Thank you for you patience! I'm also going to lower the chapter count on this, because I think a more streamlined story approach works better, which means we are nearly half way done here and the speed that things change will be increasing. Expect big changes and reveals with the next few updates!

The stinging heat of Mustafar crawled up through her boots to gnaw at the bottoms of her feet. Rey ignored it, because she was used to pain and her mind was focused on far more important things.

She was hunting.

Her quarry was close- she could feel it seeping into her through the Force. A raw presence that snaked through her darkness with shivering shattered fractals of light. Part of her hungered for that light, the small pathetic piece of her that still whined against the inky blackness that had consumed her. That part of her wanted to reach for the light with both hands and drink it down until it filled her up from within, but that part of her was no longer in control. The darkness was in control now, and it wanted to find that light and twist it, mutilate it until the one that she sought, the bringer of the lie that was the light, would writhe and cry and discard it.

She could drive the light out of him. It had been done to him before, and he was a terrifying thing to behold when the darkness ruled him.

He could be a terrifying thing again.

Her footsteps quickened, eagerness increasing her speed until she was running between the tall stalks of blackened trees. Her new home did not support life, strangling it out of what little tried to grow on the slowly healing soil. A perfect place then, for the meeting she had looked forward to for so long. She burst into a clearing and slid to a stop, her chest heaving and heart pounding.

He waited for her there, his face sad and his eyes tired.

“Kylooo,” she hissed, her voice ringing with greed, but barely discernable beneath the layers of a thousand generations of darkness speaking the word with her.

“Rey,” he stepped forward, hands held up in a gesture of sweet surrender. “What have you done?”

“I am a vessel for the darkness,” she replied, and smiled at him with pointed teeth. “They keep me alive, these Sith masters. Pouring their energies into me. It is all that sustains me, for my natural life would have ended without you. Two parts of a single soul,” she remined him.

“I know. I can feel your pain. Please don’t do this,” he begged her quietly. He watched her warily as she advanced toward him, ash and dust coming in puffs around her boots as she walked.

“Please? Isn’t that what you asked me before, to join you? The dark side is in our nature,” she quoted, giving him back his own words from the ruins of the Death Star. “I surrendered to it. I’m going to bring you back, Kylo, and then you will join me. We’ll be together, just like you wanted.”

Rage churned inside her when he looked at her with pity. “This isn’t what I wanted,” he began, but she was beyond listening. He would not reject her after all she had done for him. She launched herself at him, tangling her fingers into his hair and pulling herself up until her lips pressed against his own.

He stiffened in surprise and then melted into her, his hands grabbing and lifting her to bring her closer and hold her tight against the firmness of his body.

She could feel him in the Force, their bond bright and whole as desire and need flowed freely between them, and she felt his resolve crumble and the terrible greed replace it. He _wanted_ her, any way that he could get her. The thrill of it was overwhelming, pumping through her blood like rich wine and making her dim and dizzy with the pull of it.

This kiss was nothing like the first. There were no tentative pauses, no awkward angles. She opened to him and he plundered her ruthlessly, the flavor of him overwhelming to her senses. A hum of something unknown and insistent tugged desperately in her stomach and spread downward, leaving to her arch shamelessly against him, seeking the friction that she knew instinctively would bring relief.

“I want,” she babbled, incoherent.

“I know,” he assured her, and she knew he would provide. He would give her everything, and her heart trembled with that certainty. She caught his lip between her teeth and bit down, the sharp points breaking the skin and letting the tang of his blood run onto her tongue. He didn’t resist her, merely watched her with heated eyes as she tipped back her head and laughed with the ecstasy of it all.

When the dream ended and she woke alone, her laughter turned to screams of rage.

***

Hux eyed the new Knights of Ren, the six women he had personally chosen from among the stormtrooper program to serve as the new Supreme Leader’s personal guard and loyal servants. Ren had killed three of the first batch, and those had already had to be replaced.

Judging by the sounds coming from inside her chambers now, he wasn’t entirely certain that this current group was going to emerge unscathed either.

“Are you going to go in and check on her?”

He looked at the one who had spoken and snorted derisively. “Perhaps you should go,” he offered, sidestepping as a large chunk of the ceiling collapsed into the hallway exactly where he had been standing. She was a harder time controlling her emotions and was destroying the castle faster than they could rebuild it.

The knight said nothing. Her face was turned toward him but hidden from view behind a black helmet, and it was impossible to tell what she was thinking. He hated those helmets, and Ren’s, because they made it almost impossible to judge the mood and intentions of the wearer.

He wasn’t even entirely certain which one she was. He knew that the Supreme Leader had given them all names, refusing to learn their serial numbers, but he had not bothered to learn them. At first it had been on principle, and then it had been because he doubted they would survive long enough to make it worth his efforts.

After several more moments of awkward staring, the ground bucking and rolling menacingly beneath his feet, he sighed in irritation. “Someone has to go before she tears the whole place down.”

Six masked faces stared back at him, but not one of them moved toward the door.

Cowards.

It was unfortunate that it had come to this and he wondered briefly if it might not have been better to remain huddled in the bowels of a ship than return to power, if it meant serving under this madwoman. He had thought that Kylo had been mad, but in retrospect Kylo’s rages had been mild compared to what they dealt with now. This small woman was unhinged, cruel…the very around her so corrupt and polluted that it made it difficult to breathe.

She also had the First Order and the galaxy in an unshakeable iron grip, so he sighed again and tempted the fates by opening the door to face her.

***

She had been generous. She was absolutely certain of it.

After that horrible nightmare and the inhuman rage that had followed it, she hadn’t killed Hux or any more of her knights. Half of the roof had collapsed again, and several of the outer walls had crumbled, but the deaths that had occurred from that could hardly be blamed on her.

It wasn’t like she had done it intentionally, after all. Not this time.

The waking visions of him, hallucinations that did nothing to soothe her pain, had been bad enough. Now he was seeping into her dreams, so real that sometimes she could feel him with her when she woke. It was like being whole again every night, only to have him ripped away from her anew each morning.

It fueled her anger and her hatred, made her even more impossibly driven to get him back.

The galaxy had done nothing so far to aid her in that, resisting her attempts to impose order, keeping whatever secrets they held of the Sith and the Jedi. She knew there were those hiding away in some far corner, hoping to remain undisturbed with their forbidden knowledge.

Now, they would pay for that betrayal. Not just the ones working to keep her from saving Ben from death, but all of them- every single living thing in the galaxy would tremble and suffer beneath her wrath until she got him back.

She was going to make that undeniably clear, despite Hux’s feeble protests. It was time that the galaxy knew what they were dealing with, what the consequences would be for continuing to deny her what she wanted.

She stood at the foot of Vader’s castle, cape billowing in the hot dry air, as they prepared for her to make her broadcast to the galaxy. Beside her stood her Knights- Narah, A’sal, and Opi on her right, Kirsu, Elarian, and Sosho on her left.

They were impassive as the broadcast began, showing no reaction and no fear to the way the air moved restlessly around her and the cracks that formed in the ground beneath their feet. She was tearing the planet apart with her presence, her rage leaking out destructively even as she slept, but they wisely pretended not to notice.

Rey spoke from beneath the helmet, her voice distorted by the modulator as she explained that the First Order now held full control over the galaxy. Resistance was punishable by death, dissention by a lifetime of pain and slavery.

She paused then, long enough for her knights to turn toward her in concern and lifted her hands to open the helmet with a hiss and pull it off, revealing her face to the galaxy. Her eyes glowed yellow, and they were sunken in hollow sockets, emphasized by dark circles of pain and exhaustion. Her cheeks cast deep shadows in a gaunt face and there was no color left in her skin or lips.

The knights turned their faces away as she began to speak again, her voice no longer modulated by technology but no longer just her own.

“I am Kyra Ren, Supreme Leader of the First Order and granddaughter to the former Emperor Palpatine, and I have claimed the galaxy for my own. This is the beginning, the rise of a new unending empire. My will is indisputable, my desires absolute.”

He breath hitched and for a moment she withered, her body pulling in on itself before she straightened her spine forcefully and tipped her chin up.

“Something of great value was taken from me, something that I demand be returned. There are secrets being kept in the galaxy, knowledge of the Jedi and the Sith that is being hidden from me, and these actions prevent me from taking back what is mine. These crimes are inexcusable and will be punished. Until I have the things that I need, all trade routes, all food supply routes will be closed. There will be no more travel, no more industry. You will sit on your planets and starve until those who possess this knowledge decide to give me what I am owed.”

***

“Is that…?” Finn’s mouth dropped open, his eyes fixed on the broadcast that was being delivered all across the galaxy by the First Order. He saw it, but he didn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible.

“That’s Rey,” Rose said, and her eyes were wide and stunned as she looked from him to Kaydel, who was watching the events unfolding before them with tears in her eyes, and then to Poe as he leaned against the wall of the Falcon’s cockpit with a sneer on his face. None of them held the answers she was looking for, but she voiced the thought anyway. “I don’t understand,” she said quietly, shaking her head sadly. “How could this have happened? She was upset when she left Ajan Kloss but this…”

“This means that she’s the Supreme Leader Ren that has chased us across the galaxy and crushed the Resistance, not Kylo. She’s the one responsible for all those deaths,” Poe said bitterly.

“But Rey wouldn’t do those things,” Finn said, despite the evidence in front of his eyes that she had.

“She obviously did,” Rose said, “but why?”

“That’s a good question, and the answer has something to do with whatever it is she lost and what she thinks the galaxy is hiding from her. We need to figure that out, of there’s going to be any hope for people’s survival now.”

“You don’t really think she’s going to let people starve, do you?” Kaydel was crying openly now, and Rose turned to pull her in close, comforting her as she sobbed brokenly.

“Yeah,” Poe said. “I think that’s exactly what she’s going to do.”

Kaydel’s tears only intensified, the pain of such a betrayal and the deaths of so many loved ones apparently more than she could handle for the moment. Finn knew that she would be embarrassed about it later, but he couldn’t blame her for crying. He was feeling perilously close to tears himself.

He smiled at Rose sympathetically as she led her lover from the room, and he felt another stab of regret that her concern was longer directed at him. If there had ever been a time that he needed someone, it was now. 

Something of it must have shown on his face because he looked up to find Poe watching him knowingly. “You should have taken her more seriously when she thought you hung the moon. There was a long time when she would have done anything for you to look at her like that.”

Finn sighed, but he had no argument to give. He had messed up, and now she was happy and in love and beyond his reach.

Poe clapped him on the back. “We'll do our best to find out about what’s been happening with Rey. It must have been something big, maybe Maz can help us figure it out.”

"If we ever get there," Finn grumbled, unhappy that they were being forced to take the long way around to Takodona in Order to avoid First Order blockades. They had been playing weeks of cat and mouse games, and they still weren't quite there.

Poe just shook his head, apparently unwilling to acknowledge the possibility of failure now. The trip so far had been tense and quiet as they had repeatedly evaded capture, a small miracle that they had attributed to the will of the Force.

Slipping past the enormity of the First Orders forces should have been the hardest part of the trip but after the broadcast their journey became even more difficult.

Alarms rang and the Falcon pitched perilously until they arrived, shaken and confused, at their destination. Finn hoped Maz could help them figure out what was wrong with hyperspace as well.


	9. Dark Lullaby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's no relief, I see you in my sleep  
> And everybody's rushing me, but I can feel you touching me  
> There's no release, I feel you in my dreams  
> Telling me I'm fine- Dark Paradise, Lana del Rey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to go back to that last chapter and fix an error, the Resistance should have been nearly at Takodana to meet with Maz, not just leaving on that journey. Space travel takes more time now because the First Order Controls all of space and they have to try and avoid detection. I apologize, I made a change in an earlier chapter and forgot to update my outline to reflect that, which led to that mess up. I think we are still pretty well on track besides that mistake (hopefully!)
> 
> Once again, thank all of you so much for your support on this story. I appreciate all of you so much!

Within hours of her broadcast, people had flooded to the nearest First Order personnel on every planet, desperate to turn over what they knew or thought they knew or even suspected that someone else might know about the lost arcane knowledge of the galaxy’s lost religions.

Most of it was ridiculous, easily sorted out by a quick and cursory investigation by bored stormtroopers…but the rest. The rest was interesting.

The first to be brought in had been Force sensitive beings, not trained but easily identified as different by their friends and neighbors. Most of them were little better than children, of no use to her, but one- a slave child from Canto Bight that had stood his ground against her and stared her down as he looked up into the faceless mask of a monster- had caught her attention.

The others went to the dungeons beneath Vader’s castle to be fed, watered, and kept until she was ready to train a new generation of Sith assassins. The boy, she kept closer, in a small room near her own. He hated her and it swam through her veins like the nectar of the long-forgotten gods of the Force, the darkness inside her feeding on it, as she would teach him to feed on it.

Once Ben was returned to her, they would need an apprentice, someone small enough and young enough to mold. The boy would do nicely.

The next group was far more useful, at least initially. She stared at the five pathetic beings in their long dark robes. They were accustomed to dark power and they knew what was coming. Puddles of piss formed at their feet and the air stank with their fear.

“Sith acolytes,” Hux told her, hands clasped behind his back as he gave his report with a face that could have been made of stone. “Apparently escaped from Exegol. These were Palpatine’s minions.”

Desire coiled in her stomach at the thought. “Palpatine’s little bastards. You would have killed me back then.” She pressed the release button on her helmet and lifted it from her head. They recoiled in fear and recognition, both of her sunken and hollowed face and the sickening yellow glint in her eyes. “Now look what I have become.”

They whimpered and scurried away, howling in terror when she clawed at them with the Force, dragging them across the dusty stone floor of the castle as they kicked and writhed in her grasp.

“Tell me what you know about bringing someone back from the dead.” She was calm, her fingers digging cruelly into the face of the one who had been unfortunate enough to land closest to her feet. Blood trickled down his cheek, mixed with snot and tears.

She didn’t miss Hux shifting uncomfortably beside her, she knew he thought her task was impossible, and she shot him a warning glance that stilled him immediately.

“It cannot be done,” whined the one in her clutches. If there is a clone prepared before the death, the spirit can jump to the new body at the moment of death, but none can retrieve the soul of one who has already become one with the Force.”

“You lie,” she screamed, and the floor cracked ominously beneath them, a crevice opening that swallowed one lucky acolyte into the depths below the castle. The red glow of hot magma shone from far below, promising a quick end that the others would envy all to soon.

Rey stood, placing her helmet on her head, and looking around her at her knights, waiting impassively for orders.

“Take the others,” she commanded, her voice distorted once again by the helmet. “Interrogate them until they give you the information I seek or there is nothing left of them.”

They sobbed as the knights removed them from her room, and Hux watched them go.

“Perhaps this might have been avoided had you moved more quickly in you efforts to discover the information I seek from the archives of the Empire. My efforts have turned up only the weak and the untrained. Not the type of Force sensitive being that the Empire hunted.”

He swallowed thickly but made no effort to respond to her thinly veiled accusation of failure.

“Do you feel sorry for them, General?”

He snapped his eyes back to her helmet, his face a mask of its own. “Of course not. I show no compassion to those who stand in your way.”

“We’ll see,” she said softly and left him standing alone as she sought the refuge of her chambers. The boy was kicking the door to his room, screaming demands that he be released, and she waved a hand as she passed, putting him into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Kylo had done the same to her once, though it seemed ages ago.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said the moment that the door to her chambers closed behind her. “You don’t have to hurt people.”

She didn’t bother turning to look at the illusion of him. “I will do what I must. If they have the answers then they will give them to me. If they don’t…” she trailed off as the first scream cut through the quiet Mustafar air. “Well, then they suffered appropriately for the part they played in all this.”

“What part? Being born on Exegol and brainwashed into Palpatine’s army?”

She shrugged as the screaming grew louder, new voices rising in an agonized crescendo. “They cheered our pain, now I will cheer theirs.” She set the helmet down and turned finally to face him, this waking nightmare that she feared would take what little reason she was still capable of.

She was never quite prepared for it, the shock of seeing him there. Even when he was clearly not whole, not truly present, he was still so tall, so handsome with his ruffled black hair and sad eyes.

He sucked in a deep breath at the sight of her. She knew she was a twisted, drained version of her former self and she stared at him without reaction as he frowned.

“Rey, look at you. Look at what the dark side had done to you.” He reached up a hand, his fingers so close to her skin before he faded away.

“I will have answers and I will find a way to bring you back.” There was no response in the empty room except the sound of distant screaming, the constant sound of which soon became her lullaby.

***

“Most of them have succumbed to their injuries,” Hux told her. “We learned no useful information.”

Four days after she had ordered their interrogation the screams had grown quiet, one voice at a time, until only one remained. She had decided a visit from the Supreme Leader was advisable before there was no one left to question. Now she stood in the interrogation room, looking dispassionately at what remained of the last acolyte.

“He’s barely alive,” she remarked, turning his broken face to the side, and evaluating his level of consciousness.

“You said to continue until...”

“I _know_ what I said, General.” She turned her head toward him menacingly and he bowed, silencing his explanations.

“I have less skill in this technique than my predecessor but since there is nothing left to lose,” she murmured. The acolytes body arched in pain as she sank her mind deeply into his, tearing through his pathetic defenses and useless knowledge as she searched for information that might help her.

Sweat beaded on her skin as she pressed on, and the man’s cries became more desperate, more tormented. Hux looked down at the floor, and she knew he would need to be punished later for his weakness, but for now it took all of her effort to delve deep into the protected places of the tortured man’s memories.

Her victim was soon beyond screaming, beyond thought and beyond pain. He relaxed in her grip and as death claimed him, she caught his final fleeting thought and cradled it in her mind.

“Palpatine was trying to access the World Between Worlds,” she said. “As Vader was. A place between the living and the dead. Vader thought he could build a doorway to access it from this castle, but Palpatine thought that doorways might already exist. One that might have been destroyed, but also others.”

“Construction on the castle is nearly complete,” he told her.

“Yes,” she murmured. “And we will hope it successful. If not, then we will begin to search for these other doors.” She eyed him mercilessly. “By then you will have the information from the Emperor’s archives, or you will join the others who have failed me.”

He didn’t flinch, didn’t give into the urge to look around at the carnage that surrounded him. “Yes. Supreme Leader.”

***

Maz stared at them all for a long silent moment before shaking her head slowly. “I don’t know the answers to these questions,” she said finally. “A thousand years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Chewie shook his head beside her, obviously just as perplexed, just as sad at what Rey had become.

“But you know someone who might?” Poe prompted. “You said you might know someone who could help, someone who wasn’t a Jedi?”

Maz nodded slowly. “She was trained as a jedi before she left that path. She might know more than me.”

“Why would anyone leave the Jedi?” Rose shook her head, unable to fathom such a choice.

Maz smiled. “Did you think the Jedi were perfect? No, kiddo, they were flawed. We all are, and they were no exception.”

“But they were the good guys,” Finn insisted.

Maz merely shrugged. “They tried to serve the light, that’s true, but anything can harmful when taken to extremes.” She held up a hand when they started to argue. “You should talk to her. Then you’ll understand more. You must remember that Darth Vader was once a Jedi.”

“And Rey,” Rose said softly. “She’s changed.”

“The dark side has a strong grip on her now. You must figure out why.”

“If we can find this mysterious ex-Jedi. Travel right now...it's not safe.," Finn reminded them. "Rey’s horrible ban on space travel is probably going to save lives if we can stop it before people starve to death because hyperspace is…Well, it’s messed up.”

Maz nodded. “I'll go with you but she still might not even answer our questions when we get there.”

“She’ll have to," Poe said. "I have a strong feeling that whatever happened to Rey and whatever happened to hyperspace are connected. Ever since she left, things just keep getting worse.”

“The dark side has never been stronger,” Maz agreed. “It’s like the light side of the Force itself is fading. I just don’t know why.”

Finn nodded. “Then we’d better find out quickly, before it’s too late for all of us.”

“It's good we have Chewie with us now. We’re going to need as many good pilots as we can get.”

Chewie roared his agreement, seemingly quite happy to finally get off the planet he had been stuck on for months.

“He is finally healed, and he’s ready to get back in the mess. He wants to help you. And that girl,” Maz said. "It's too much to sit here in his grief. He's lost too much- Han and Leia, Luke and Ben."

“Ben?” Kaydel looked around, her face scrunched up in puzzlement.

“Han and Leia’s son. Ben Solo.”

“I didn’t know they had a son,” Rose said. “What happened to him?”

“Leia told me he went away when he was young, to Luke’s temple,” Poe said quietly. “Like the rest of them, he never came home.”

“No,” Maz agreed. “He didn’t. But he didn’t die with the rest.” Finn looked away guiltily before she continued. “Ben Solo was Kylo Ren.”

“What?” Several people turned to look at Chewie in confusion and he nodded, acknowledging the truth of Maz's story.

“Kylo Ren was Han and Leia’s son? Why didn’t anyone tell us?”

“It was painful for all of them. Only his family knew- Han, Leia, Luke, Chewie, and Lando.”

“I knew,” Finn confessed. “I heard him talking to Han on Starkiller Base, before he killed him.”

“And you didn’t tell us?”

“It didn’t exactly come up right after, we were on the run until after Crait and then Leia asked me not to say anything.”

“Did anyone else know?” Rose was clearly struggling with trying to accept this new information.

The Wookie grumbled at Maz.

“Rey,” she said. “Rey knew, too.”

“Rey knew? Did she ever tell us _anything_? How did _she_ know?”

“She was on Starkiller,” Finn explained.

“It was more than that,” Maz said in response to Chewie’s mumbling. They sat in stunned silence as Chewie related the story about Rey confronting Ben Solo on the Supremacy. They knew she had been on Crait, but they knew nothing about her confrontation with Snoke or what had happened after.

“She went there alone to try and turn Ben Solo back to the light after he killed his father?”

Chewie nodded.

“Why didn’t she tell us?”

Rose tipped her head. “We don’t all of this story,” she said flatly. “You either, Chewie. A woman doesn’t just run off like that.”

Kaydel looked at her skeptically. “They barely knew each other. You think she had feelings for him?”

“The Force works mysteriously. We don’t exactly what happened between them or what happened to Ben Solo. It seems like that might be part of the mystery you need to solve.”

“Rey wouldn’t have anything to do with Kylo Ren,” Finn said.

“Look at what she’s become,” Poe told him. “We didn’t know her like we thought we did. She obviously had secrets from all of us.”

“Well, then maybe Leia shouldn’t have trusted a Palpatine,” Finn grumbled.

“A what?” Everyone but Maz turned to stare at him in disbelief

He looked up dejectedly. “Rey’s a Palpatine. He was her grandfather. Well, her father was a clone of his, anyway.”

“They trained a Palpatine? Raising their own dark lord of the Sith wasn’t enough for them?”

“He wasn’t a Sith,” Finn said tiredly. “And we all trusted their judgement. Leia believed she could handle it.”

“Well, that clearly worked out well for everyone involved.” Sarcasm dripped from each word as Poe shook his head in disbelief.

There was a moment of silence as they all contemplated the decisions that had brought them here. The mistakes were becoming clearer as they uncovered the mysteries in Rey’s past, but there was still so much unanswered.

“Tell us where to go, who to find,” Poe insisted. “We’re running out of time and options.”

Maz looked at them seriously. “You need to go to Lothal.”


	10. The End of Hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Don't know how to be so close to someone so distant  
> And all I gave you is gone- Dynasty, MIIA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm genuinely just skimming the edge of canon content after this. I don't want to have to get too in depth with all of the stuff from the Star Wars cartoons and comics, so please just consider this canon adjacent with a bit of my own dramatic flair or interpretation.

Ahsoka Tano sat quietly in her home on Lothal and listened without interruption as they filled her in on the parts of Rey’s story that they had all seen for themselves and the parts that they had been forced to piece together since her disappearance.

The Togruta woman was still stoic as they spoke, possessing the same sort of calm reserve that they had once found so disconcerting about Maz. She stared through them, assessing them as though she held eons of wisdom that they could never hope to understand.

Rose was teary eyed, and Finn was stiff with repressed anger and betrayal, but she paid little attention to their emotional involvement, viewing the whole of their story as a frightening puzzle to be compiled and solved.

“When did her behavior change, exactly?” she asked when they were finished.

“Exegol,” they said in unison.

“What happened while she was on Exegol?”

Silence descended over the group as each of them realized that they didn’t know exactly what had happened that day.

“She killed Palpatine,” Rose said hesitantly. “He was her grandfather, though most of us didn’t know it at the time, and she didn't know him before that day.”

“Is that all?” Ahsoka waited patiently letting them search their minds and sift through the bits of information that they had, the little snippets of stories and experience that might hold useful clues.

“She died,” Finn said finally.

Everyone turned to look at him in surprise.

“She didn’t,” Poe said with a laugh. “She came back to us for months after Exegol.”

“I know she came,” Finn told them, shaking his head and shrugging. “But I know she died. I felt it in the Force, but when I asked her about it...she wouldn't explain it. Just said it was too painful to talk about.”

“How is that even possible?” Kaydel asked Finn bristled when it became clear that she didn’t believe him. She shook her head unapologetically. “No one can die and come back to life.”

“Well, she did,” he said stubbornly.

“It’s not entirely impossible,” Ahsoka said softly. Her face was creased with lines of contemplation and she sat for several long moments thinking over the story that they had presented to her. “Hmm, that would explain far more than just Rey’s strange behavior. The growing darkness in the galaxy, the way the light is dimming every day, hyperspace fraying at the edges…”

“What is it,” Maz asked. “I have lived a very long time and I have never seen anything like it.”

“Neither have I,” Ahsoka assured her. “I always thought it was nothing more than a Jedi fairy tale.”

“What was?” Rose leaned forward eagerly, determined to make some sense of everything finally.

“A dyad,” Ahsoka explained. “A single soul born in two parts. One life in the Force that exists in two bodies.”

“You think Rey was part of a dyad?”

Ahsoka nodded.

“Okay, but how would that explain her dying and everything that has happened since?”

“Only a dyad pair has the power to bring a soul back from death. Whoever Rey’s other half was, that person must have sacrificed themselves to save her.”

They all exchanged puzzled looks.

“We don’t know who that could have been,” Rose explained apologetically.

“A powerful Force user," Ahsoka explained, "like your friend.”

“Well, there was Luke and Leia," Finn said, "but they had already died before Exegol.”

“Who else?”

“Palpatine?”

“Too old,” Ahsoka said. “He had already died once before she was even born.”

Kaydel frowned and looked around at the others. “Who does that leave? It’s not like there are a lot of Jedi and Sith running around these days.”

“Kylo Ren,” Rose said with certainty. “It leaves Kylo Ren. That’s why he disappeared after the Final Order fell. He died.”

Maz nodded in slowly, understanding finally washing over her face. “She took up his name, his position, his helmet. She went after everything that belonged to him.”

“Trying to fill the wound,” Ahsoka agreed. “The bond between a dyad pair is like nothing else. They would have been able to feel each other constantly, maybe even see and touch one another across great distances.”

“She hated him,” Finn said skeptically. “She fought him. I saw her.”

“You saw their conflict,” Rose said, “but we know she went after him on the Supremacy and she left him alive on Kef Bir. There must have been more that we didn't know about.”

“And what?” Poe asked. “She just kept all of this and the Palpatine stuff from us the whole time?”

“Look at yourself, kiddo,” Maz said bluntly. “It wouldn’t have been easy for her to tell anyone.”

Poe shook his head and ran a frustrated hand over his face. “Fine, the most important thing now is how we fix it.”

“I don’t know if we can,” Ahsoka admitted. “The dyad is a powerful representation of the Force. You can try to kill her, but I honestly don’t know if that will make it better or worse.”

“He brought her back,” Kaydel mused. “Maybe we can bring him back.”

“He’s already become one with the Force," Ahsoka said helplessly. "I don’t think even the dyad can undo that.”

“So, what? We’re all just doomed now because of this? Once again Kylo Ren and the _ kriffing _ Palpatines destroying the galaxy?”

“Please sit down, Finn,” Poe said tiredly, clapping Finn on the shoulder and urging him down on the chair beside his own. 

“It may destroy the galaxy but it’s not their fault. They are meant to be twin flames of light and darkness that come together to bring balance to the galaxy. They are powerful vergences, some say they may even be reincarnations of the two halves of the prime Jedi’s perfectly balanced soul. Whatever happened that got one of them killed before they could accomplish that is to blame here.”

“There’s nothing that can be done?” Rose was stubborn, clinging to the hope that everything they had fought for might not all be lost. 

“I don’t know. My knowledge of the Force is vast, but we cannot kill her or bring him back. We might once have been able to alter the past, but that doorway was destroyed to keep Palpatine from accessing it and whether Kylo Ren could be saved without killing Rey is uncertain anyway.”

***

“Report, General Hux?”

He trembled before her, his eyes never leaving the floor as he answered her.

“The information that the First Order had collected from the Empire about tracking down Force sensitive beings was lost when the Resistance destroyed the Supremacy.” His voice was devoid of emotion, but she could feel the fear rolling off him in waves. “We’ve tried everything we can to recover it but have been unsuccessful.”

“What do you suggest I do now General? The children I have found might be valuable someday, but they are no help to me in accessing this place that exists beyond time and space. Do you have another plan to gain access to this dimension? Or is your usefulness at an end?”

He tipped his head up, blue eyes staring into her faceless mask. “The construction on the castle is finished. If Vader were ever close to opening a portal, you now have access to that ability. The castle itself channels a vengeance in the Force, as you said.”

She glanced to her side, where the Knights of Ren waited for their commands. It would be so easy for her to have him destroyed for his failure in bringing her the information from the Empire, but he had served her well. He might be of some value still and he had fixed her castle.

“What do you think, Temiri?” The boy was seated at her feet, and he looked up at her, his face twisted with anger and disgust. “Do you think the General has earned his right to continue breathing in my presence, or should we let the Knights of Ren dispose of him?”

Temiri looked down at Hux who stared back at him coldly, no trace of emotion on his face. Temiri hated the General nearly as much as he hated her. Hux had been the one to give her Temiri, and the boy hadn’t forgotten it. She wondered how much mercy he had left in him, for surely the time he was spending with her had begun to chip away at it.

His fist balled at his side and she turned to give the order.

“Don’t kill him,” the boy mumbled. “He tried his best.”

“You’re very lucky,” she told Hux. “Our young friend here is still capable of compassion.”

The Knights of Ren chuckled and Hux glared at them before turning his attention back to Temiri. “Compassion is a weakness,” Hux told him and Temiri sneered.

“He’s right,” Rey said, reaching out to knock the boy lightly on the back of the head. “Though, in this case he should be grateful for your weakness.”

Hux’s expression was pinched when the Knights laughed again and Temiri rubbed the back of his head in irritation.

“Now, come, all of you. If the castle is finished, then it is time to see if we can open this portal and take back what is mine.”

“What have you lost?” Temiri asked, his curiosity overcoming his hatred as they all followed her out of the throne room, his legs pumping quickly to keep up with her pace.

“A person,” she said quietly. “A very important person.”

Temiri peaked up at her, his mouth turned down in a frown. “Did you love that person?”

“I did,” she said. “I loved him with all of myself, my whole heart and soul.”

“Is that why you’re so angry all the time?”

She chuckled, something in her stirring at the child’s questions. “Yes, it is. Now be quiet.”

He was silent as they climbed, not uttering a sound until they emerged at the top of the castle, it’s two spires rising into the sky high above them. “Whoa,” he muttered, peering over the edge to look down at the ground far below them.

“Stay away from the edge,” she barked, waving a hand to indicate that the Knights should grab hold of him before he fell. “Watch the boy,” she commanded. “I don’t have time to worry about him right now.”

The portal was wide, carved with lettering of the Sith that they had pieced together from old Imperial records and the Sith holocron that she’d found on Exegol.

“How do you open it?” Hux asked her.

“With the Force,” she explained, reaching out with all of her energy to press into the portal, to nudge it open and let her access what was beyond it. The Sith runes glowed red, and the castle shook dangerously.

“Is it supposed to do that?” Temiri asked loudly, and one of the Knights swept him up in arms and carried him a safe distance away as he squirmed to see what was happening over her shoulder.

The portal glowed, the red energy within pulsing as she strained against the fabric of the universe itself- when it cleared, she could see Ben on the other side.

“Ben,” she whined, struggling to keep the portal open as she pushed forward.

Scenes from his life passed in front of her, brief flashes of his life as a young Ben Solo and a conflicted Kylo Ren. She was weeping openly as she watched him reach for her hand across a galaxy and screaming with need as he ran into the depths of Exegol.

“Ben, no,” she begged, her sobs echoing in the hot night air. She tried harder, the stones on the castle beginning to collapse beneath her feet as she strained to get to him before she had to watch him die yet again.

She reached the edge of the portal as Palpatine threw him into the pit, and her hand met a solid invisible barrier, one that she could not push through. Its surface was hard and flat, like the mirror that had revealed her own face back to her on Ahch-to.

She pounded it with her fists until her hands were raw and bleeding, using all of the darkness in her soul to try and force it open, until she watched Ben smile and fall, then she collapsed on the ground in front of it as despair poured into her again.

She had met the same fate as Vader, so close to success and unable to reach the one thing she coveted most. Her grief whipped through the Force and everyone ran for the stairs as the spires began to crumble, raining down chunks of stone from above.

Her portal was worthless, and the records of the Empire had been destroyed, taking with them her chances of finding anyone that might have knowledge about how to save him.

She had reached the end of possibilities, the end of her hope.


	11. An Unexpected Gift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some days  
> It's hard to see  
> If I was a fool  
> Or you a thief- Dynasty MIIA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am trying to finish up current WIPs and to do that more efficiently, I am going to be doubling up on updates for the fic that is closest to being done. Since right now this fic is the closest to being complete, that means that every time I cycle through them, this fic will be getting two chapters before I move on the next story, instead of just one. 
> 
> I should have the next chapter of this ready to go by tomorrow.
> 
> Please enjoy the overall craziness of this, I am bending all the rules but I am having fun with the story and I hope you do, too.

Rey remained at the top of the castle as darkness settled over Mustafar and and she remained there as the new day began to rise. Hux had come to check on her after the stones had finally stopped quaking and then each of the Knights in turn as the hours passed by. Even Temiri had crept up the stairs sometime near dawn to peer at her over the top of a large broken piece of spire, his hate for her seeming to melt into something closer to pity.

He reminded her of herself as a child, gazing at Plutt in one of his drunken stupors- empathy was difficult to truly kill in someone so young and the darkness inside her hissed and seethed at the warmth his softened gaze woke in her heart.

“Go back inside,” she commanded, the voices not her own layering on harsh and thick to cover the tears, the weakness inside her.

He ran out from behind the stone, wrapping his arms around her waist so quickly that she did not have the presence of mind to stop him, then slunk back down the steps, casting worried looks over his shoulder as he went.

New rage curled through her at this stark reminder of what she had lost, the children that she would never have. Her emotions careened through the Force sending stones trembling, the cracks in the floor beneath her feet healing and reforming wildly as pieces of the spire lifted themselves back into place only to topple to the floor once more. The sky above her began to blink in and out of daylight- stars twinkling in the blackness one moment and the sun shining down on her the next.

Inside, people were screaming.

The Force had been warping around her for some time- the darkness spreading, the earth beneath her feet quaking and blackening with each step, hyperspace twisting out of control. She had known that her search for Ben was a race against time, because the Oracle had told her that her unbalance would tear the galaxy apart. She was a vergence, an unstable one that would cause the collapse of the universe, tear the fabric of space…and time.

She walked to the edge of the tower, peering down at the boiling bog- the body of the oracle lay beside it, rotted away to almost nothing.

Turning, she descended the stairs rapidly, boots clunking against the floor as she went. As reached the bottom of the staircase she could hear the voices more clearly, the terrified shouts of stormtroopers that were throwing their helmets to the ground and fleeing toward the front of the castle.

She let them go, passing a wide eyed Hux and her Knights as she passed the throne room.

The inner walls of the castle were collapsing only to be built anew in different configurations and she wondered how many times Vader had rebuilt the structure, how many different versions of it were currently trying to exist in this space at the same time.

Hux sprinted after her, picking up Temiri as he went, and the Knights followed, all of them eager to get out of the castle before it collapsed around them completely.

The trees grew and burned and fell only to rise again as she crossed the distance to the marsh, her feet sinking into wet mud that pressed intolerable heat up through the bottoms of her boots. She welcomed the pain, used it to tighten her grip on her power, and brought the rapidly cycling sun to a halt just above the horizon. She stared coldly out across the bubbling bog-on the head of a fallen baby sat a familiar fat bug, watching her curiously.

It blinked at her languidly, then turned its gaze the rotting corpse her feet.

“Interesting,” it said calmly. “What are you?”

“I am part of the next dyad in the Force,” she answered, “The other half of Kylo Ren. Have you met him yet?”

The Oracle scuttled further up in the baby’s head, it’s eyes fixed on her masked face. “I do not know Kylo Ren. If you look for those who are powerful in the Force, I know only Darth Vader.”

“So that is when you are,” she quietly to herself. Then, louder, “You will know Kylo Ren, in time. I am sure of it.”

He blinked at her again, then at the body she was certain it recognized as its own. “What is happening? How have you done this?”

“I am the end of the galaxy, the bringer of destruction. Death has taken my other half from me, the one I love who also loved me, and created a wound in the Force. Now, it will all end.”

The Oracle stared at her, but remained silent.

“Tell me how to bring him back,” she said, repeating the demand that she had given the first time she had come here.

“You have altered time already,” it said finally. “Simply go back and get him yourself. I cannot stop you.”

She ground her teeth together so hard they hurt. “I would, but I cannot control how far back in time the shifting Force ripples take me. I would need to be exactly _where_ he was, exactly _when_ he was. It is nearly impossible in a galaxy so large with such a long history. At one time, he was here, but I cannot control it to make him appear here now. Do you see? _You_ are always here, that is much simpler.”

“For thousands of years,” it agreed, and it nodded, conceding her point, but then shifted its hideous body anxiously. “It is unnatural to return the dead. If I would not tell Vader how it is done, then why would I tell you?”

She waved a hand at the body at her feet. “That’s what you told me before,” she said with a hiss. “It ends well for no one.”

“Of little consequence to me,” it said slowly. “Even if I helped you now, I am already dead.”

“You have the chance to ensure the rest of the galaxy does not share your fate,” she reminded it. “It is nearly too late.”

It blinked at her again, slowly, and scuttled its many terrible legs.

“There is only one way that I know of, but that door is closed, long destroyed in the future time that you must exist in.”

“But it’s a doorway,” she said, thinking it through quietly and feeling a small spark of hope ignite inside her. “Something that existed in one place for many years? I would just need to go there and wait for the Force to begin to unravel in that specific location.”

“It was there a millennia before I was born,” it told her. “Arriving at any time in the past few thousand years will allow you to pass through the doorway. You will find what you seek on Lothal.”

She nodded, relief settling into her bones, and removed her helmet. “In the future, you will meet me again, but it will not be the me that remembers you. Before that, you will meet the one I seek, the one who calls himself Kylo Ren.”

“The one who loves you and is part of a dyad,” it said, parroting her own words back to her. “I will tell him so.”

Rey smiled, understanding now how Kylo had learned that they were part of a dyad.

“I am sure he will be delighted to hear it,” she said dryly. “You must not mention this meeting to either of us. It could change everything, make it so we never end up here at all and everything is destroyed. Do you understand? If you tell Kylo, Palpatine may win. If you tell me when we meet again, when I do not yet have the ability to move through time, there’s no way to predict what might happen, what I might do.”

Its gaze flicked to the body, and then back up to her face. “How long will I have?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure exactly when you are…decades maybe?”

It nodded again. “I could see many things, but not my own end. Perhaps that is why I did not see you coming. Time stretched out before me, infinite and isolating. You have given me a gift, this glimpse into my own future.”

She placed the helmet back on her head, nodding her acknowledgment and her gratitude, then turned on her heel and walked away. She paused at the crest of the small hill overlooking the bog, turning back to find the head of the baby empty. Above her the sky blinked stars into life, followed much too quickly by the sun.

She was running out of time to make things right.

It was easy to ignore the fleeing of confused stormtroopers and she wasted little energy paying attention to their cowardice, kicking aside abandoned armor as she went and barking orders at one she snagged by the throat as he raced by her- slipping a hard Force suggestion into his mind that he should go and release the terrified prisoners from the basement dungeons because she might need them later- but it was harder to find the people she was looking for.

She finally tracked them down huddled together just outside the castle, waiting for her to come back just out of reach of the falling stones.

“Let’s go,” she briskly, not stopping to see if they were going to follow because she was certain that they would. She led them to the command shuttle, the same one that had once carried Kylo Ren to a fateful meeting on Takodana, its wings rising into the air menacingly.

It was tight fit for her, Hux, the Knights of Ren, and Temiri but she dared not risk trying to navigate hyperspace with a full star destroyer as the galaxy unwound itself around her. As the vergence at the center of the collapse, she couldn’t be certain that the ship they were in would not unmake itself as they flew, leaving them all floating in the cold bleakness of space, or that hyperspace would not spit them out in the center of the nearest star instead of at the coordinates that she had programed into the ship.

She said none of that the others, ignoring the way they clustered together and watched with frightened eyes as she did the preflight check of the ship, pressing buttons and slipping switches until the engine hummed and the gauges indicated that all systems were prepared for takeoff.

They left the planet’s atmosphere in only a few short moments, and they all watched as the surface of Mustafar smoothed back into calm. The trees paused in their growth, the castle stopped falling to lay now as a ruined heap with a collection of stones from all its versions piled on top of each other, the sun paused in the sky and the stormtroopers stopped running to look around in relief.

Around them, the ship began to shake ominously.

Rey clung tight to her control, trying not to let time wobble while they were trapped on the ship. She had a plan, she had hope, she just needed not to kill them long enough for her to get there.

Beside her, the hallucination of Ben settled into the copilot’s seat and calm settled over her. She did not turn to look at him, but she could see him, the vague outline of his shape out of the corner of her eye. As long as she didn’t look, she could pretend he was real, she could pretend that she could feel him in the bond that they had shared.

The ship stopped shaking and everyone visibly relaxed. Hux slouched on a bench in the back, Temiri napping with his head on Hux’s thigh, and the Knights of Ren took their helmets off, setting them down on the floor with a series of _thunks_ that seemed loud in the confined space.

Her eyes flicked over each of them- young, frightened, hardened by everything they had seen and done.

The dark side pulled at her, whispering that she didn’t need any of them anymore. They had only been useful to her while she needed their help to bring back Kylo. Now, they were a liability, a weakness that could be used to defeat her.

Small breaths slipped out from between her lips, the urge to strike them all down rising in her throat until the need was choking her.

Beside her Ben whispered, “Remember what you are, what you used to be.”

She turned her face away, closing the door between the cockpit and the seating area, and the temptation to hurt them faded. They were loyal, they belonged to her. She would keep them for as long as she wanted.

She stayed awake as they flew, navigating them through oddities in hyperspace that she had never encountered before, pushing past on instinct and diving into cracks that brought her out in the wrong places, but ones that were somehow closer than she should have been.

If there was any good left in what remained of the Force, it was pushing her toward Lothal as fast as her ship could go. They jumped out of hyperspace to find the ship’s onboard computer giving them a time and date that meant they had somehow arrived on Lothal a few minutes before they had left Mustafar.

Hux sniffed at the indicator, “Well done, Supreme Leader. We have made excellent time.”

Rey chuckled dryly as they approached the planet’s atmosphere, then sat forward to squint down at the surface in surprise. The landing field below her was not empty, and the clear and unmistakable outline of a ship told her exactly what kind of trouble waited below.

“The Millennium Falcon,” Hux observed. “It seems we have found the Resistance here, as well.”

“Perfect,” she snarled.


	12. Temple Rising

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The scar I can't reverse  
> When the more it heals, the worse it hurts  
> Gave you every piece of me  
> No wonder it's missin'- Dynasty MIIA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit of a shorter chapter but you all know by now that I love to end things on a cliffhanger and since it comes so close after the chapter from yesterday it doesn't feel too much like cheating. We are getting close to the fun stuff now!

The illusion of Ben disappeared as the command shuttle approached the planet’s surface, his fingers nearly brushing her face in am imitation of intimacy that makes her _ache_. The thought of his hands on her skin pushed her forward, driven toward this one singular purpose with an intensity that makes the dirt of Lothal roll in waves like the tides of Kef Bir.

The door of the shuttle hissed open and she led the way down the ramp, Hux and the others behind her, Temiri clinging to the neck of a Knight though Rey doubted he knew which one it was since they had their helmets back on.

Beyond the Falcon, the door of a hut burst open and she spotted several familiar faces, ones that she had thought she would never see again. Finn, Rose, Poe…even Maz and Chewie. She had wondered if any of them survived the First Order assaults on the Resistance and the small spark of joy she felt was quickly smothered by the dark, tendrils of hate wrapping it up tight to snuff it out.

She had given everything for them, and they hadn’t even _noticed_ her grief, hadn’t even _cared_ about her sorrow. They had claimed to love her, but she had never been able to tell them _anything_ for fear of their judgement.

Everyone from the shuttle came to a stop at the bottom of the ramp, and Rey set her feet against the unnatural pitch and roll of the planet’s crust beneath her- a Palpatine with all the power of the dark side coursing through her, the reformed Knights of Ren and the Destroyer of Worlds at her back.

She was beyond fear of their judgment now and they would beg for her forgiveness before she was done with them.

The darkness inside her was hungry for their suffering.

All of them stopped just beyond the doorway, faces twisted in shock and horror at what she had become. They gripped onto each other, holding tight as the ground rolled and the hut swayed dangerously.

Finn reacted most strongly, and she knew instinctively that he could _feel_ her, the twisted and rotting core of darkness that sustained her life. It was needy and though its ultimate goal was to have both halves of the dyad in its grip, it would take what it could get.

He retched into the dirt as it reached for him, power snaking across the ground to sink his consciousness, the voices that lived inside her mind now whispering foul words of power and seduction and pain.

Someone that Rey did not recognize stepped forward, protective of the others- an old togruta woman in long white robes. Though Rey has never seen this face before, the darkness and the voices inside her ripple at a familiar, oppositional Force energy.

Rey lifted her helmet off and reached for the saber at her hip. It sparked red, crackling and unstable as she ignited it.

“What you have come for was destroyed long ago,” the woman told her flatly. “You will not find what you seek here.”

“You are powerful in the Force,” Rey responded, watching knowledgably as the grass at their feet began to cycle rapidly through the seasons, greening only to wither and die again and again. “But you have no idea what I am capable of. Where is the doorway?”

“You cannot do this,” the woman began, put Rose pointed to the sky with a trembling finger. The sky darkened as the sun fell below the horizon only to appear in a blaze of warming pinks and purples on the opposite side a few seconds later.

“I will tear this galaxy apart,” Rey said simply. “There is no power in the universe that can stop it _. Where is the doorway?_ ”

“Ahsoka, we don’t have a choice,” Rose pleaded. “Nothing that she does there could be any worse than what is happening now. We have to find a way to bring him back.”

Rey smiled, a flash of teeth that she knew was more threatening than reassuring. “You should listen to her,” she crooned. “Rose was always the smart one.”

“Rey, please,” Finn begged, and she turned on him, letting the lightsaber blade fade away to nothing and flicking him backward with a thought, making him stumble.

“Did you tell them? Do they know now?” she demanded. “The secret that you and Leia kept from me? That I’m a _Palpatine_?”

“Yes,” he said defiantly. “I told them, and I admit we should have told them, and you sooner…”

“Do you think they would have accepted me? Any of them?” He hesitated and she smiled bitterly. “Of course not. Better to use me and leave me to die. That’s what the Jedi did, did you know? Used me to kill my own grandfather and left me to die alone in the darkness of Exegol.”

“Rey…”

Rose’s voice was heavy with pity and only Poe’s restraining hand on her shoulder stopped her from stepping forward.

“I _died_ that day,” Rey screamed. “They let me die and then, as if that was not enough, they let the other half of my soul pour his own life into me until he had nothing left to give. I watched him _die_ in my arms, _disappear_ in front of my eyes and then I had to feel his presence fade away, the bond between us severed, until I was empty and broken inside.”

“We didn’t know,” Poe said, holding his hands up in a silent plea.

“Of course, you didn’t. Would you have felt sorry for me, Poe? A broken little _Palpatine_ with a hole in my soul because _Kylo Ren_ died of me? The Jedi certainly didn’t. But the dark side…oh, the dark side understood my pain. It understood how the Jedi use you up and spit you out when they’re done.”

“What do you think is going to happen if you get him back?” Ahsoka asked. “That the dark side is going to let you be happy?”

Rage rippled and the Force whipped around them, the ground at Rey’s feet turning black as the air around her soured. “He will be with me,” she growled, all of the voices inside her laying thick and heavy over her own. Even Ahsoka flinched at the sound. “The galaxy will be ours, but it will be whole. Would you rather time and space be torn apart? _Where is the doorway_?”

The sky above them splintered sickly, fracturing into differently colored sections like someone had forced to together pieces of mismatched puzzles meant to show different times of day.

“Your time is running short,” she said pointedly.

“We have to help her,” Poe conceded. “Whatever comes after, we’ll deal with when it happens. If we don’t bring him back, everything is doomed.”

Ahsoka looked at each of them and they all nodded. Chewie grumbled his assent with a shrug, as though to acknowledge that they had no other option.

“This is the doorway,” Ahsoka said, waving a sweeping hand toward the grass covered him behind them. “What is left of a Jedi temple.”

Rey sprang forward, nearly running as she swept past them, ignoring them as she focused her mind on the rubble. She pressed deep with her mind and she could feel it now, the vergence buried deep within. She sank to her knees at the bottom of the hill, willing her rage to press further as the grass receded, blackening and wilting in her presence.

“You cannot access it,” Ahsoka insisted from behind her. “It has been destroyed for decades.”

Rey pushed forward, ignoring the others and watching with greedy eyes as the rubble before her began to quake, flying through the air to stack once again in chunks of brown that speared upward into the sky. She did not how far back in time the ripple would take them, but it did not matter. The doorway would stand, and she would be able to reach him.

Everyone behind her scrambled back as the spire rose, staring in awe at the temple as it towered above them.

Maz whistled low and quiet, “Guess even I don’t know everything there is to know about the Force.”

Rey turned to Ahsoka, her breath coming in short, eager pants. “Where is the entrance?”

Ahsoka shook her head. “You have to open it.”

Rey stepped forward and the threat clear in her stance. “How then? How do I open it?”

“You need two Jedi- a master and an apprentice.”

“I don’t _have_ two Jedi,” Rey screamed and the ground beneath the hut opened, swallowing it whole as her rage consumed it.

“We have Ahsoka,” Maz said, ignoring Ahsoka’s protest, “and Finn. That's a Master and an apprentice." She looked at them all with patient eyes, watching Finn swallow doubtfully at the task he was being asked to do and Ahsoka tap her foot angrily into the dirt. Then she looked directly at Rey. "It will have to do since it’s best for someone else to do it. You might accidentally tear it down in your anger.”

Rey nodded. “Do it now,” she demanded, stepping back watching impatiently as Ahsoka coached Finn through how to open it. He stood beside her, both of them holding their hands out as they stretched their energy out toward the temple. It trembled and then began to turn. Sweat beaded on his forehead as it rose from the ground, twisting around to reveal first one door, then another.

Rey didn’t wait for the others, striding inside with her unlikely band of followers behind her. Hux hushed Temiri's questions as they all stepped through the door into the first chamber, and Ahsoka and the others looked at the boy curiously.

“Show me where to go,” Rey said before they could ask questions about who he was or how she had found him. She ignited her saber, casting an eerie red glow that illuminated the walls and gave off enough light for them to see their path, then stood stiffly, waiting in the darkness of the underground room for a reluctant Ahsoka to lead the way.

They were silent as they walked, nothing disturbing the peace of the temple except the sound of heavy boots striking the ground and quiet breathing. When Ahsoka finally stopped, they all looked up curiously as she gestured to the wall before them.

There was a painting, more than twice as tall as any of them, of three people on a background of gold lines, gold circles. The figure on the left was a woman with a bird on her shoulder, the figure on the right, a young man with red markings on his skin. Between them an older man, taller than either of them. At their feet, wolves waited.

“The Mortis Gods,” Ahsoka said, pointing to them each in turn as she named them. “The Father, the Daughter, and the Son,” Ahsoka explained. “The representation of balance in the Force.”

“This is the doorway?”

“This is the key,” Ahsoka explained. She lay her own hand over the daughter’s, pressing with her energy and an open palm until the lines on the painting began to glow, the figures began to move. The Father pointed the way, and the wolves ran into the shadows.

“Follow them,” Ahsoka instructed and they all moved to obey, Rey in the lead.

There was nothing in the shadows but the wall of rock and the wolves, running upon it in a large circle.

“What is this?” Rey said, blinded by tears of rage and frustration. “This has brought us nothing!”

“This is the doorway,” Ahsoka explained. “You must pass through.”

Rey reached out, her gloved hand sliding into the wall and sending energy running up her limbs.

“Rey, you cannot do this,” Ahsoka said quietly. “If he gave his life for you, as you say, then pulling him out will only serve to let you die instead. We will still end up here with the other half of the dyad. There has to be another way.”

“There is no other way,” Rey said firmly. “I tried all the other ways.”

Ahsoka sighed, shoulders slumping in defeat. “Then let me go with you. Let me try to help you find a way to fix it.”

“We’ll all go,” Rose said. “We will help you if you let us. It doesn’t have to be a war between us. We love you and we want you to be happy and whole.”

Rey flicked a glance at her, at the tight grip she had on Kaydel’s hand, then at the others. “Hux, please wait here with the Knights and the boy.” Rose looked hopeful before she continued, “Keep the rest here, as well. Do _not_ let them leave. They have much to answer for when this is all over.”

She didn’t wait for an answer, they all knew the price for failure. She grabbed Ahsoka by the arm and stepped through the doorway into darkness.

At first, she could not see, but she could hear and all she heard was him.

_You’re so lonely_

_Did he tell you why?_

_Let the past die_

_Kill it if you have to_

_You’re nothing_

_Say it_

_But not to me_

_You’re not alone_

_We’re a dyad in the Force_

_Two that are one_

_Join me_


	13. Fractured

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Made it through the maze  
> To find my one in a million  
> And now you're just a page torn from the story I'm building- Dynasty, MIIA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am still doing two updates for this story on every rotation through my WIPs so the next chapter should be available in the next few days. We are finally getting to the place where stuff will start to come together so I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Please excuse any typos, we have experienced a sudden and unexpected death in the family and while I find writing to be a positive distraction I am not sure how well I am focusing. I gave it my current best effort.

Rey blinked against the darkness that enveloped her as she stepped through the doorway, through the veil that separated her from whatever path she would need to follow to find the other half of herself.

The world outside ceased to exist as she passed through the barrier, the air inside was devoid of movement, of light or temperature or smell. The air around her was absolutely and impossibly still but there was a tension, a vibration that felt like anticipation.

Whatever was here, it had been waiting.

Ahsoka sighed as the dark revealed its secrets and thin lines appeared before them- trails of vibrant red energy that pulsed angrily as it snaked away from their feet and disappeared into the distance. “This place does not like the energy that you have brought with you.”

Rey bared her teeth in a threatening grin. “If the Force did not wish for me to come here, then it should not have taken him away from me. I had no choice and now it will suffer as I have suffered.”

“We have to find another way,” Ahsoka said firmly, but Rey simply tightened her had around the older woman’s arm and propelled her forward, each step they took leaving behind a glowing path of iridescent red footprints to guide their way back.

“Have you been in before?” Rey asked, looking into the deepening darkness on either side of them and straining her eyes to see what might lie ahead of them on the path. She could hear whispered voices that she could not understand, and she pressed onward.

There was no fear inside that could equal the fear of never seeing Ben again.

“I have,” Ahsoka confirmed and Rey noticed the odd twinkle in her eye. “But you will not find what you seek here. If you take him out of the past, you will die. It is not a solution.”

“You said that already but there is no solution so you’ll help me,” Rey insisted. “We have to find a way.”

Ahsoka’s hand was gentle on her arm, but Rey could feel the tumult of emotion and confused thought that ran rampant in her. “Rey…”

“Look!” Rey lifted her arm, pointing to the end of the path in front of them where a large circle loomed-dark and quiet and ripe with possibilities.

“Rey, no...” Ahsoka began but Rey was no longer listening. She dropped Ahsoka’s arm and ran the rest of the distance, sliding to a stop only when she was able to stand panting at the base of what her instincts told her must be another portal.

“How do I open it?” she demanded, turning to look over her shoulder to where Ahsoka waited calmly.

“They open for you, to show you what you need to see.”

Rey turned back to the portal, still frozen and still. She pressed her hand against the cool surface and was reminded painfully of the mirror on Ahch-To. “Let me see him,” she whispered. “Ben.”

The portal sprang into life, light and sound rising in a crescendo from deep within until a stream of images filled her vision. Tears, hot and bitter, ran down her cheeks as she recognized the scene in front of her. The blue light of Exegol made nausea slide like slime up the back of her throat as she ran her eyes over the three figures that dominated the image. Palpatine stood tall and proud on his throne, his rotting skin restored through the energy that he had stolen from her and Ben- leaving them both crumpled on the floor.

She knew what happened after this- how many times was the Force going to make her watch him die?

She pounded her fist on the hard surface of the portal, a scream of rage ripping from her lips when Ben staggered to his feet only to be lifted and tossed again down the pit. She had heard the cracking of his bones, remembered the pain and the fear. If she could cross the threshold now, she would tear Palpatine apart- rip the limbs from his body, tear the flesh from him bones.

Whatever power he had then, it was nothing compared to the darkness that had grown inside her since.

“Rey, stop! You don’t know what would happen if you pulled him out now. If Palpatine drained your power before…I can feel the darkness inside you and I have never felt anything as strong as this. What he could be, what he could become.”

“It would be no worse than what is happening now!” Rey pounded her fist on the portal again as she watched the past version of herself finally stagger to her feet. Once again, she was running out of time. “I can’t control what is happening to the galaxy, time and space as we know them will cease to exist.”

Ahsoka shook her head, held her hands out in supplication. “We can figure something out.”

“It is too late for that,” Rey snarled, pounding her fist against the portal again and smiling savagely when the surface of the portal cracked beneath her hand, red lines spreading from the point of impact to run haphazardly through the dark- a violent slash of erratic color in the peaceful surroundings.

The ground beneath her trembled, and Ahsoka reached for her as she brought her arm back again, but it was too late. Another solid blow from her hand echoed in the air and the tension- held so tightly and rigidly since they had arrived that Rey had nearly forgotten it- exploded.

The energy knocked Rey back, forcing her off her feet as she slid back down the path with Ahsoka beside her. Red cracks snaked angrily up the walls- not the thin and narrow webs of a moment before but large and dangerous.

Rey pushed herself to her knees with only thought in her mind. She could see the portal and the scene beyond it, see Ben as he hauled himself back over the rim of the pit and began to drag his broken body across the ground to reach the place where the Jedi had let her fall.

“I cannot let you do this,” Ahsoka told her, stepping in front of her before she could regain her feet. “You’re tearing this place apart and no one knows what the consequences of that might be.”

“I don’t care,” Rey said simply, knocking Ahsoka back with the Force and wave of her hand. Behind her, in the portal, Ben was drawing her limp body into his lap.

She had only minutes left.

The path beneath her feet glowed red as she began to run, her hand already fisting at her side, but she was pulled off her feet as the Force wrapped around her and tugged her back. She hit the ground hard, blood pooling in her mouth as her teeth snapped together at the impact. Her vision swam, black and unfocused and she blinked rapidly, trying to draw in a breath.

When her sight returned, Ahsoka stood defiantly between her and the portal, a white lightsaber ignited in each hand. “You cannot do this,” she said again. “I cannot let you destroy the galaxy.”

Rey pushed herself up, reaching for own saber with the Force as she pressed up from her knees to her feet. She ignited it with the flick of a switch, the familiar red cross-guard crackling and spitting with a rage that was almost equal to her own. The darkness inside her whispered its promises of revenge as she stepped forward, the first strike her saber meeting the white of Ahsoka’s crossed white beams with a hiss. Ahsoka’s eyes were sad but determined as she looked back at Rey through the open space between their illuminated weapons.

Behind her, in the portal, Ben faded away to nothing.

Rey screamed, the evil inside her driven mad with pain and power and pivoted quickly to strike Ahsoka again. The hum of their sabers and the harsh sounds of their breathing were the only sounds as they fought. Rey swung the saber again and again, wild emotion driving each hacking slice of the blade and each stroke ending in growls of frustration as Ahsoka calmly knocked aside each attack as she stepped back toward the broken portal.

“You destroyed everything,” Rey panted, her next swing nearly catching Ahsoka by surprise as she reversed her grip in the saber at the last second and swung at an unexpected angle.

“I am trying to help you,” Ahsoka said, pushing out a hand and knocking Rey back again with the Force. “I want to help you.”

“Liar!” Rey screamed, reaching for the Force and using it to pull herself back to her feet and then farther, launching herself over Ahsoka’s head to land in the path behind her, closer to the portal. “I’ll make it go back. I will make it show me again and then I will reach in and take what is mine.”

“It did not open for you for a reason! If you take him, it will only make things worse- for you and for all of us! I will help you, we all will, if you let us.”

The was no lie in Ahsoka’s voice, no trace of deception on her face, only the earnest need to fix what had been broken.

_Liar_

_She lies_

_She’s a Jedi_

The darkness, the voice that lived inside her mind began to whisper, to frolic and froth at the edges of her consciousness and push away at her own thoughts.

Through it, from beyond the veil of anger and hate and loss that she had believed to be impenetrable, came something else. Something brighter and full of truth and hope. The calm certainty of Ahsoka’s presence in the Force as she focused on reaching Rey’s mind.

“You are a Jedi,” Rey said furiously, trying to push the comforting warmth away with a vicious swipe of her mind.

“I was a Jedi,” Ahsoka admitted. “But I saw the flaws and the mistakes- I left the Jedi order.”

Rey let her hand fall limp, let the spitting blade of the saber dim, and then disappear. “You did?”

“Yes,” Ahsoka said with a nod. “I am not a Jedi, but I have given not given in to the darkness, either. There can be balance.”

Rey shook her head, hand tightening on the quiet saber. “There is no balance for me without Ben. Without him…there is nothing, not even death.”

“I know,” Ahsoka told her, turning off her own sabers and returning them to within the folds of her robes. “I will help you find a better way than this- one where you can be together.”

Rey hesitated, weighing her options as she considered which would be most likely to help her find her way back to Ben before the vengeance that she had become tore the galaxy apart. The choice was taken from her was the cracks in the inky energy beyond them began to deepen and spread, pulsing menacingly. Both women were forced to stumble back as the pathway beneath them split and a large chunk of it fell away, disappearing into the depths of nothing below them.

“We have to get you out of here,” Ahsoka cried, reaching out her hand as Rey jumped across the widening chasm. “Your presence here is going to rip a hole in the place.”

They began to run back the way they had come, and Rey could hear the screams of familiar voices growing louder from outside the realm they entered, from the people still waiting in the temple. Cries of fear and pain that told her clearly that whatever damage she had done to this place, was also being experienced in the world beyond.

New portals, ones that they had not seen when they walked the path before, sprang to life beside them as they ran, each showing a scene that was familiar to Rey.

The day her parents left her.

The moment in Takodana when she had first touched a lightsaber.

Ben connecting to her mind in the interrogation room on Starkiller Base.

“We’re too late,” Ahsoka cried, skidding to a halt and sinking to her knees. “I can feel the Force- everything is coming apart. There’s no time left.”

There were tears on her cheeks and Rey could feel the despair that wrapped around her in the Force. It was a stark opposition to the savage pleasure that rolled inside her own mind. The dark energy that she had turned to rejoiced in the destruction and the pain.

Rey didn’t want that, she realized. She had never wanted the destruction- she had only wanted Ben. And now, after everything she had done, she had still failed.

She turned away from Ahsoka, still kneeling dejectedly on the floor as the world around them splintered and cracked and narrowed her eyes on the path in front of them. The faint red glow of another portal was barely visible in the distance.

“I’m going to pull him out,” Rey said firmly. “Whatever happens, it can’t be worse than this.”

Ahsoka looked around her at the destruction and only nodded. Even her hope, it seemed, was finally gone.

Rey sprinted up the path, dodging the cracks and the holes and the flying bits of debris as the glow of the portal came closer and closer. She could see now, the scene playing within it and she recognized herself- cold and wet and shivering in the dark cave on Ahch-to. She was reaching out, placing her hand on the cold glass of the mirror. The memory stood out clearly in her mind- two figures merging into one before showing her nothing but her own reflection.

Rey slowed to a walk, straining to see in the dark. Standing in front of the portal was another person- someone else in this realm that had lifted their hand to touch the image of hers against the glass. The figure was familiar- tall and broad with shoulders slumped in sadness and defeat.

She took another hesitant step, her lips forming a name that was nearly silent but still had him turning to look at her in disbelief.

“Ben?”

Her heart raced painfully as she looked at him- his black curls were tousled and unruly from the paths of his fingers running through them in frustration, and his feet and chest were bare but he was whole and unmarred by blood or bruising. His face- she drank in the beautiful line of his nose and the bottomless unfathomable depth of his eyes- was still unscarred as it had been after she healed him on Kef Bir and she supposed she should be thankful for his sake that whatever miracle of the Force had brought him here had seen fit to provide him with pants.

“Rey?” He took several large running steps toward her before coming to a stop a few paces in front of her. He seemed dazed, looking at her and then around at the destruction that was rapidly closing in on them as though he had been unaware of his surroundings. “What’s going on? How did you get here?”

He reached for her, his hand almost grazing the skin of her cheek as she stepped back, just out of reach. A new fear rose inside her with the memory of the times that she had seen him before, when she had imagined him beside her only to be denied wholeness again and again.

What if this wasn’t real and he was yet another cruel trick of her mind?

His face creased with worry as he looked at her and she knew what he would see. The yellow eyes of the Sith were the only color she had anymore, and her skin was gray and unhealthy, with dark circles in the hardened hollows of her cheeks and the sunken crescent moons below her eyes.

She felt surprise and horror and then a dawning sense of realization as he ran his eyes over her and took in the details of her appearance. His gaze rested for a long moment on the familiar saber in her hand before coming back to her face.

The tumult of emotion from him might have been enough for her to recoil in shame if she hadn’t been so overwhelmed with relief. She could _feel_ him- the confusion and disgust that radiated off of him in familiar spikes of energy that held his unique signature in the Force. She reached for him with her mind, following the long dormant threads of the bond that had been severed until she reached the singular point of pain that had been the ragged broken end…and then beyond it to where she could only just feel the familiar pulsing energy on the other side.

It was weak, but the connection was there and for the first time since he took his last breath, Rey felt like she was truly able to breathe.

She launched herself into his arms, unable to control the sobs or the stream of nonsensical words that tumbled from her lips as she tried clumsily to explain what had happened and how he had left her alone with nothing after he had promised he wouldn’t.

He wrapped her in his arms, his feelings still helpless and confused, and she buried her face in his shoulder and let their combined relief flow through the thin strands of the bond that connected them.

She did not know how long they stayed there, holding desperately to each other and ignoring everything around them, but when she finally lifted her head the angry red cracks had disappeared and the path beneath her feet had stopped shaking.

All that remained was still darkness and a path lit by white light- Ahsoka stood watching them from a few feet away, a tremulous smile on her face.

“So, this is the infamous Ben Solo,” she said. “He looks like his grandfather.”

Ben looked down at Rey. “Do you know her?”

“A little,” Rey told him honestly. “There is a great deal to explain.”

He nodded and reached for her hand. “Like what this place is and how I got stuck here?”

“I was kind of hoping _you’d_ know the answer to that actually.”

Ahsoka walked by them, waving a hand to indicate that they should follow. “I think I might have some theories about that, but first we need to find out if we can still get out of here.”

They followed her in silence, Rey still holding on tight to Ben’s hand with her fingers wrapped around his to keep him from letting go. If she let go of him, the Force might find another way to take him from her and that she would not allow.

His skin was warm and soft, nothing like the cold and stiff hand that had faded from hers on Exegol. He was not dead nor was he a ghost or a spirit like Luke had been on Ahch-To. He was alive, somehow gloriously and impossibly alive and she could sense his energy and hear the steady beat of his heart and the soft in and out rhythm of his breath.

Tremulous and uncertain hope began to awaken inside her and she tightened her grip in his hand even more, until she could feel the slight grinding of his bones under the pressure. He didn’t complain, and gave her hand another squeeze in return, as though the slight pain that she knew was radiating up his arm only served as a reminder that she was really there.

Ahsoka was waiting for them by the portal that opened back into the temple and the wolves were still running in their endless circle. “It looks to still be intact,” Ahsoka said, “but we should go. I don’t know how long it will stay or what time we may find ourselves in when we leave.”

Rey frowned. In her joy she had forgotten that they had only been able to access this place by using the warping of time to travel back to a moment before the temple had collapsed. She listened carefully, but she could not hear the screams of the others from inside the temple anymore.

“I don’t hear the others,” she said, pulling Ben forward into a light jog until they stood beside Ahsoka at the portal. “If we come out in the past, they might not be there. What will do then?”

“Wait, you went back in time?” Ben said, looking from one woman to the other with wide eyes.

“I don’t know,” Ahsoka said, ignoring Ben with a shrug. “Let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.”

Rey bit down nervously on her lip and shot Ben a wobbly smile that she hoped was reassuring. “I promise we will explain everything to you, but for now we just need to go.”

He looked down at her, at what she knew was a face that had been ravaged by loss and dark energy, and nodded.

They stepped through the portal first, holding firmly onto each other as the still air of the in-between realm was replaced with the cold air of the temple. The sound of whispered voices and the smell of dirt flooded Rey’s senses and she opened her eyes as Ahsoka stepped out of the portal behind them.

“Supreme Leader Ren?” Hux stepped forward out of the shadows, peering at them uncertainly.

“Hux? What the hell are you doing here?” Ben’s voice was puzzled and he looked between the general and Rey with confusion as he tried to tuck her safely behind his body. “You shouldn’t be here. Go back to your ship.” The air of command in his tone was unmistakable but Hux shook his head.

“I was not speaking to _you_. I was talking to _her_.”

“ _What_?”

Rey stepped out from behind Ben, assessing Hux and the small group of people that were huddled behind him. The Knights were there, as well as the few members of the Resistance. “Where’s Temiri?”

“He’s here,” Rose said, lifting the bottom of her jacket and revealing his face tucked against her side. His cheeks were tear stained and his eyes wide with fear, but he appeared unharmed.

“Any injuries?” Rey asked, turning back to Hux for the report.

“No, Supreme Leader,” he assured her. “Things were certainly _interesting_ for a moment, but no one was harmed.”

“Then let’s get out of here,” Rey said, turning to leave and not looking back to see of the others would follow. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now that the dyad is restored. I don’t want us to get stuck in the past.”

“You might want to run,” Poe said from behind her. She looked over her shoulder and found him pointing at the ceiling, where dust and small pieces of stone were beginning to rain down on the tunnel below.

“Not again,” Rey groaned, grabbing Ben’s hand and tugging him into another sprint. “Grab Temiri and let’s go. We have to be outside before this place collapses back into oblivion!”


	14. Fragile Bonds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And all I gave you is gone   
> Tumble like it was stone  
> Thought we built a dynasty forever couldn't shake- Dynasty MIIA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got so stuck on this chapter and figured out on the third rewrite that I needed to change POV so I hope you enjoy this piece of the story through Ben's eyes.

Ben Solo stood outside the crumbled remains of what had been a Jedi temple only moments ago. Somehow grass grew over the hill composed of its rubble, hiding the evidence that any such place had ever existed, despite him having run out of it himself so recently that his racing heartbeat had yet to return to normal. Judging by the extent to which nature had reclaimed that which the Jedi had built, it now looked like the collapse had happened half a century ago instead of less than five minutes.

“I…I don’t understand what is happening here at all,” he said quietly, his hand still wrapped around Rey’s and his eyes roaming restlessly over the temple’s remains as though the answers he sought might be spelled out in the grass. “There was a temple here. We were inside the temple.”

“Yes, we were,” she agreed with a subtle shake of her head, as though to clear her mind and focus on her words, “but the temple is gone. It was destroyed a long time ago.”

He huffed and opened his mouth to ask another question, to try and understand even a hint of all the impossible things that had had happened since his world had faded to darkness on Exegol, but Rey shook her head more firmly and set her lips in a thin and uncompromising line. “There will time for full explanations later. I need to check on things, see how the rest of the galaxy is holding up.”

He jolted a little at that, the reminder that beneath the overwhelming joy he had felt to see her on his side of the portal, there many things about her that were not at all what he would have expected.

“General Hux, please return to the shuttle and contact the rest of the First Order. Find out what you can about the state of the galaxy, hyperspace lanes, all of it.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader.” Hux nodded and handed the child- whose presence filled Ben’s mind with another thousand questions that he knew she wouldn’t answer- to the nearest masked figure in black before striding away quickly to follow her orders.

Ben looked helplessly at the women, their helmeted faces unfamiliar to him, and realized that they reminded him strongly of his own Knights of Ren, though the design of their masks was not identical. Clad all in black and impassive, they seemed to be waiting for Rey’s orders as his own Knights had once waited for his. For her sake, he hoped these women had more loyalty. 

His gaze wandered back to the child, who smiled at him, wide and friendly. He bore little resemblance to Rey, though that did little to stifle Ben’s initial impression that she might perhaps be his mother. She didn’t seem overtly maternal toward him, but she was protective in some ways, so it was still a possibility, though one that tugged ruthlessly at Ben’s heart.

The boy’s face was the only friendly one apart from Rey, as what appeared to be a few scattered members of the Resistance was standing a few feet away, glaring at him with varying degrees of hostility and distrust. Ben recognized Chewie, a very old woman that had known his father, the defected stormtrooper, and what might be the odler version of the son of a Resistance pilot that he had known long ago and whose name had long since forgotten. The others he didn’t know at all, including an old Togruta woman who was watching the entire scene unfold with patient eyes that instantly made him wish he had a lightsaber on his hip.

The more he was able to take in of this situation, the less sense any of it made.

“So, now what?” FN-2187 asked, raising his arms to gesture to the sky, where the sun hung low over the horizon in a bleeding canvas of red and orange. “You just go back to the First Order now that you have him?”

Rey shrugged, her painfully thin shoulders shifting restlessly beneath the black fabric her tunic. “I’m sure that we can have a ship here in only a few minutes to arrange for your transport off planet,” she said, her smile not much more than a curved gash beneath the dark hollows of her cheeks and the yellow gleam in her eyes. “I meant what I said before- you have much to answer for.”

Rose shook her head in disbelief. “You got Kylo Ren back and you’re still not yourself. I thought getting him back, even after everything he’s done and all the people the First Order hurt while it was under his command, would bring you back to us. It was supposed to help fix things.”

That caught Ben’s full attention, putting to rest the first theory that had entered his mind when he had seen Rey’s haggard appearance and felt the dark energy pooled inside her- a theory that he thought had been given even more weight when he heard Hux refer to Rey as the Supreme Leader- which was that he had died and somehow been pulled into an alternate dimension where Rey had fallen to the dark instead of him.

“It _did_ help fix things,” Rey said. “I am no longer a vergence that is tearing apart the fabric of time and space. I never said that finding him would change my mind about anything else.”

Ben’s eyebrows shot up in surprise at that, though he supposed it would explain a lot about the temple.

“We aren’t even going to get an explanation for what’s happening?” Pim- was that his name? Pahn? _Poe_ Ben remember finally- asked, his voice rising. “You got him back, you have to stop this. You’re killing people!”

“Come on, Ben, let’s go,” she said, ignoring Poe and giving his hand a tug and leading him after Hux toward the shuttle. The Knights- and he was nearly certain now that she had created her a version of his own Knights- moved without prompting to surround her prisoners and then fall into step behind them.

Ben cast a quick look over his shoulder at their frightened and defeated faces, an echo of the spiking jabs of sadness and terror clawing at him through the Force. “Rey, _please_ , I need to know what’s going on,” he begged. “How long has it been since Exegol? How did you end up with Hux and these, uh,” he glanced at her Knights and shrugged, “people? You’re the Supreme Leader of the First Order? It doesn’t make any sense.”

She stopped and turned to smile at him, but the joy didn’t reach her eyes and the energy that she bled into the Force was both hers- unique and familiar and home- and something else that was vile and greedy. It was the worst thing he had ever felt, and he stood in the presence of both Snoke and Palpatine, had followed the dark into deep vergences of foul energy himself. If this was as improvement over what she had been, it was hard for him to imagine what she must have become in his absence.

“It’s been just over one standard year since Exegol,” she said, and relief washed over him that the child was not hers and it had not been a decade or more lost to them. “I took over the First Order to be able to find you and, in the end, I had to cross time and space to do it. If I hadn’t, the galaxy would have destroyed itself- one half of a dyad left everything out of balance. I know you need to know more, but there is so much to explain and very little time right now.””

He took a deep breath, the force of it causing his chest to shudder, and nodded. That had, at the very least, answered the most pressing of his questions, though it left him with an overall feeling of puzzlement.

“It felt like I was only gone for a few minutes,” he told her honestly. He reached for her face, his fingers caressing the firm line of her cheekbone as it poked against her skin. “I’m so sorry that I left you here alone after I promised I wouldn’t.”

“I don’t blame you for this,” she said shortly, and anger seethed through the bond. It was still weak, but the connection was enough for him to feel the depths of her rage. It was greater than anything he had ever known. “I know exactly whose fault all of this is.”

“Palpatine?”

She laughed and the sound was bitter and too sharp, without a trace of mirth. “We knew what Palpatine was, what he was capable of. No, I place the blame for this at the feet of the Jedi, where it belongs.” She took a step closer, placing her hand in his chest and looking up at him with eyes that gleamed with malice. “When you’re Kylo Ren again, we will have everything we need to start an endless dynasty, stronger than the Sith ever had.”

_“What?”_

“I already have the boy,” she said, waving her hand to where the Knights walked on ahead of them, the child clutched the arms of the one in front. “An apprentice.”

He shook his head, blinking down at her and trying to understand what path could have led her to this. “You…you want me to be Kylo Ren?”

“Of course,” she said, tipping her head to look at him curiously. “You only turned away from the power of the dark side because I foolishly asked you to. None of this would have happened if I had just taken your hand when you offered it to me, but I learned that all of that was a mistake.”

“Rey, we can’t…”

“Can’t?” A thin layer of amusement finally laced her tone, and she bared her teeth at him in another semblance of a smile. “I’m the Supreme Leader! I _crushed_ the Resistance- everyone fears me and my grip on the galaxy is absolute. There is nothing that I _can’t_ do.”

She reached out a hand, sent a gentle tug out through the energy of the Force, and closed her fingers around the familiar curve of his helmet when it flew into her grip from where it had fallen. She offered it to him, then shrugged and placed it over her own head when he didn’t take it.

The memory of its weight settled over him as he felt her contentment at the protective barrier that it provided, against what he knew she saw in his eyes when she spoke of her plans for the future.

Her voice was distant and distorted when she spoke to him through the modulator, but her hand was still steady in his. “We are together now, and nothing will ever take that away from us again.”

He nodded and felt her reach into the bond again, a questing sort of hesitant contact that seemed to be her just reassuring herself that the connection was still there. A flash of her memory brought with it a searing pain, echoes of despair and hopelessness that stole the breath from his lungs and made his heart stutter on a thousand stabbing pins, his muscles screamed and even his bones ached.

Had this been what it was like for her without him?

He shook his head hard to clear it, barely able to process her whispered apologies and reassuring promises and reached instinctively for a tendril of dark power and anger to ward off the pain. He had years of practice using his pain to fuel his power, but she had known nothing of this when he had died. Life without their connection must have been unbearable for her until the dark found its way in.

If the rotting pool of energy inside her was even half as potent as he suspected it was, she had given herself over more completely than anyone he’d ever heard of. It had kept her barely alive, but at a cost that he could hardly imagine.

What had been his Rey had become something else, something dangerous, and he was suddenly terrified that he would never be able to get her back. It had taken years of effort by people he loved to reach him, and he had not been nearly as lost.

He watched her quietly when they reached the shuttle, his eyes drifting over her small figure as she commanded his general and her own Knights. They all moved with terrified efficiency and the only one who seemed to not fear her was the child she had declared to be an apprentice- he ignored her orders until the nearest Knight had to lift him and carry him into the shuttle to close him away until a larger dreadnought arrived to hover just above the planet.

Before they boarded the shuttle, she saw to it that the Resistance members were loaded into a transport that would move them from the planet’s surface to whatever fate awaited them once on board the First Order ship and that the Falcon had been moved to a hangar in the dreadnought- nodding to General Hux and snarling, “Make sure the Falcon gets moved aboard. It’s time this piece of junk stopped showing up just in time to wreck so many carefully laid plans.”

When she beckoned for him to follow her into the shuttle and then again to take the copilot’s seat, he didn’t argue and when he found out she’d arranged to have clothes waiting for him when they landed, he took them with a grateful smile. He tugged the shirt on as he watched the prisoners being unloaded from the transport, Chewie giving him a quiet rumble as he passed.

Rey was busy the moment they arrived, fielding questions and giving orders as personnel scrambled to deal with the massive effects of some sort of disturbance that seemed to have rocked the galaxy. It became rapidly apparent that she had not been exaggerating about the impact of their broken dyad on the rest of the universe and he listened without interrupting as she handled crisis after crisis.

He stood for a few minutes awkwardly shuffling his feet as he listened to the reports- “Hyperspace seems to be stabilizing but we have reports of several planets that seem to have disappeared entirely. None were habitable, fortunately, but we don’t have a full accounting yet of the damage from all systems so there could be others…”- before he glanced at her helmeted face and walked quickly out of the hangar in the direction that the prisoners had been taken.

First Order ships all shared the same basic configuration, and it didn’t take him long to reach the detention cells. He got the impression that several of the officers and stormtroopers he passed in the corridors would have stopped him if they hadn’t been in the middle of running scans and trying to make sense of the narrowly escaped disaster, but, was it was, no one attempted to speak to him until he reached the detention area itself.

The guards, masked troopers in standard issues white helmets, stepped helpfully out of the way after a quick wave of his hand a few whispered suggestions. He gave them an extra nudge of energy with the Force to ensure they wouldn’t come back and then let himself into the detention hall where the Resistance was being kept.

A few flicks of the buttons and the door to the large cell slid open. They all looked up at the sound, but their faces fell when they saw him, their hopes of rescue quickly dashed as he blocked their way out.

“I’m fully prepared to help you as much as I can,” he told them quickly. “But first I need to know everything. What the hell happened to her?”


	15. Mismatched

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thought we built a dynasty, like nothing ever made  
> Thought we built a dynasty forever couldn't break up – Dynasty MIIA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are so close to being finished and I will another update for this story very soon, since this is still the shortest and therefore in line for a double update. Hope you enjoy this chapter and the rest of what's coming. Please note that I am updating the tags now that I have a better idea of how I plan to end the story. I really wasn't sure where I was going with it so I apologize.

The incarceration block of the cell was quiet as everyone stared at Ben. No one moved or spoke to answer his question, and the Force rippled with shame and confusion. 

“Well? Someone has to know what happened!”

“You died,” said a cold voice from behind him, and Ben turned to find Hux standing behind him, leaning on the wall with his arms crossed over his chest in irritation. “She didn’t take it well.”

“There has to be more to it than that,” Ben said, looking back at the others for confirmation. They all shook their heads and refused to meet his eyes. 

“We didn’t notice it, not really, the way she stopped caring about anything. Then one day she just disappeared,” Poe said quietly. “The next thing we knew the First Order had a new Supreme Leader and we were dying faster than we could count the bodies.”

“She just showed up one day,” Hux said, shaking his head. “Marched right onto a dreadnought, killed anyone who opposed her, and took your place. She said she was your wife, and she had your helmet and saber.”

“Separating the dyad creates instability,” the Togruta woman said. “It would have been a wound in her soul beyond imagination. Like death, but without rest or peace.”

“This is Ahsoka,” Poe said, gesturing to her and shrugging. “She knows more about the dyad than any of us.”

“Which is, unfortunately, not much,” Ahsoka said. “I can only hope it will be enough.”

“My death was enough to cause all of this?”

“It opened her to the dark side,” Ahsoka explained. “She was using that power to stay alive and try to bring you back.”

“And she had a thing that she called a Sith holocron,” Hux said. “She said it showed her the secrets of Darth Vader, the way he tried someone back from the dead. She tried everything but every time she touched that thing she was even more out of control.”

There was a shuffle of noise at the end of the corridor and everyone turned, expecting to have to deal with angry stormtroopers, but all six of Rey’s Knights were hurrying down the hallway, their helmets tucked under their arms. 

Hux sneered. “What are you doing here?”

“Same thing as you,” said the one in front, the leader by the looks of it. “Trying to save her so we can save the kriffing galaxy.”

Ben looked around, bewildered, at the small, mismatched group that surrounded him. “Anyone else?” he asked, trying to not be amused at the unexpected turn of events. 

“Just me,” said a small voice at his elbow. Ben looked down to find the child from before, the apprentice Rey had said, looking up at him. 

“How did you even get in here?”

“I climbed through the ventilation shaft,” the boy said. “She hates it when I do that.”

“Why do you even want to help her?” Hux asked. “You hate her.”

“I wanted to help the Resistance. Besides, I only hate her sometimes,” the child admitted. “Sometimes she cries when she thinks no one can hear her, and then I don’t hate her as much.”

The stormtrooper, FN-2187, was staring at the boy as he spoke. “Rose,” – Ben glanced at her face and filed the name away for future use - “does this kid look familiar to you?”

Rose looked at him more closely. “Oh, Finn, this looks like the boy from Canto Bight!”

He held up his hand, showing her a ring on one finger that was too large. He pushed a button, and the ring flashed the symbol of the Resistance at her. “I’m Temiri,” the kid said with a smile. 

“This kid saved our lives,” Rose said excitedly. 

“It really is a small galaxy,” Hux said, his face pinched and bored. “Can we get on with this?”

Finn glared at him. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten what you did to us on the Supremacy.”

Hux shrugged, unfazed by the other man’s hostility. “I can reschedule that execution,” he said, and Finn took a menacing step forward. 

Ben knocked them both back with a shove of Force energy. “We don’t have time for this. If we are going to help Rey, we need to do it now, so I get you back to the Falcon and off this ship.”

Once again, no one moved. 

“There’s nowhere left to go,” Ahsoka said and Chewie grumbled his agreement from beside her. “We wouldn’t make it to the next system before she had the ship destroyed. Reaching her is our only hope.”

“I don’t know how,” Ben admitted. “I don’t even know how I’m here right now.”

“Your soul was tied to hers,” Ahsoka said. “When you died you couldn’t move on, nor could you turn to her as a Force spirit. You were trapped in the between, the world that exists between worlds.”

“That makes sense,” Ben said, shoving a frustrated hand through his hair. “But how do I save her? She’s changed so much. She hates the Jedi now?”

Maz- he remembered her now, blinking behind her thick lenses as she looked up at him- nodded sagely. “She blames them for what happened to you. You’d have to ask her to know exactly why.”

He sighed. “Why are you all helping me? After everything I’ve done.”

“We know what she’s capable of,” Rose said sadly, “and you’re the only one who can save her. The only one who can save us all.”

***

She took them to Mustafar, back to the place Hux told him she had spent most of the last year as she raged and wept and destroyed much of the galaxy. 

It hadn’t changed much since he had last been there, searching for wayfinders and cutting his way through Vader’s cultists. It was still hot and dry and miserable. 

The shuttle that had brought them down from the dreadnought had not even closed its door behind them when she began to issue commands. The boy, Temiri, was to be returned to his rooms in the castle and the rest of the prisoners, looking around as though they might have decided that getting blown up was preferable and were now regretting not making an attempt to escape, were to be taken to the dungeons. 

“Is that really necessary?” Ben asked her, trying to see beyond his old helmet to the woman beneath. 

“Yes,” she insisted. “You have no idea what they’ve done. All of them. They are all to blame for what happened to you. The Resistance, the Jedi, all of them.”

“What did the Jedi do?”

He felt the swell of rage inside her, a tide of fury that clawed its way up his throat through the bond. “They made me their vessel and left me there to die. They abandoned you to die. It’s unforgivable.”

He nodded, swallowing down the choking sensation in his throat and struggling to breathe through her pain. “I understand why you would be angry about that. I was angry about the Jedi, too. For a long time.”

She tipped her head, looking at him curiously. “You will be angry again and then the last of this distance between us will cease to exist.”

He ran a hand over her arm, a comforting rub that swept from her shoulder to her elbow, and she shuddered at the contact. Her chest rose and fell rapidly and he could feel the conflict in her between the part that wanted to step into his arms and enjoy the warmth of his embrace and the part that had become accustomed to existing on pain and rage that it was afraid to let those things go. 

She took a step back and his hand dropped away. “Please, feel free to explore what is left of the castle. I have to go and make sure that the prisoners are safely locked away.”

She didn’t- he knew that she trusted that her orders would be obeyed- she just wanted to put some space between them before she gave in to the temptation of his presence. He had done the same with her before he died. 

He hadn’t been able to resist her for long, though, not once he was with her. The bond was too strong. That gave him some hope, because even though the bond had been weakened with his death, it was getting stronger again. He could feel her tumultuous emotions more clearly with every passing minute, and he knew that she would be able to feel his, too. The love he felt for her, his devotion- there was no way for her to hide from it, so it would be only a matter of time before she was forced to face it.

He wandered the castle- the walls and stairs the same sort of crumbling mess that it had been the last time he was on Mustafar. Hux said that she had rebuilt it countless times but kept destroying it in her madness. 

Ben kicked away a crumbled stone as he walked, then paused as he caught the edge of a familiar energy behind a close door. He glanced around, uncertain of what might be beyond it or who might take offense to his prying before deciding that as the former Supreme Leader and dyad partner of the current one, he could go where he wanted. 

The door swung open on silent hinges to reveal a dark room with all of the walls still intact. He didn’t need to know the layout of the room well to find what he was looking for- he could sense it, the familiar ache of it beneath his skin. Darth Vader’s helmet, once his own prized possession, stared silently back at him. 

He glanced around at the rest of the room- the bed and the sparse scattering of personal items. Rey’s room, he realized, as he crossed to the window and looked out over the reddened landscape. 

The bog he remembered from before was just below him, though the mysterious creature that had told him he was part of a dyad was now missing from its perch. It’s body, the empty shell of it, was just visible on the shore. Instinct told him Rey was responsible, and he wondered if she had chosen this room because it let her look down on what she had done. 

The damage and the depravity of her actions were unthinkable. Not so much because of the extent of the harm she had caused, he had served under Snoke and done untold damage himself, after all, but because it was Rey that had done it. 

That, more than, anything else he had seen since she had arrived to pull him back to the realm of the living, kept him from reaching again for the dark side of the Force. Seeing her so broken, so twisted with malice and hatred, had hurt him more than he thought possible. 

She had been his beacon, the unwavering light in his dark world. Everything about her had been lit with purpose and conviction. He wanted her to have that back, and if he had to be her light now, to guide her back as she had done for him, then that’s what he would do. 

He would have to put aside his guilt and focus on that goal. There had to be a way to reach her, a way to show her that they could be together and be happy without the darkness that had sustained her during his death.

“Hey kid.”

Ben froze, every muscle in his body tense and wound, ready to fight or flee as the soft familiar voice rolled over him like an ice bath in Mustafar’s hot, dry air. His fingers were numb and unfortunately empty as he turned to face his uncle. 

He should have thought to ask Rey for a saber, if he didn’t think she’d be willing to return his old one. Any saber at all would be better than none right now. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked tersely, his lip curling into a derisive sneer as he took in Luke’s oddly colored and slight transparent form. No one had ever mentioned to him that Force ghosts were so unusually blue. 

“I told you that I’d see you around,” Luke reminded him. “Well, now I’m seeing you.”

Ben snorted, some of his tension dissipating as Luke wandered around Rey’s bedroom, his attention focused elsewhere and not directed at his nephew. “Yes,” he agreed, “but why now? Isn’t it a little late for a pep talk? You let me die…you let her die.”

Luke sighed. “Yes, we did. And incalculable harm to the galaxy by allowing death to separate you. I thought I had learned my lesson about having too much pride and not letting old rules get the way of my common sense, but it seems I was wrong.”

“You were all wrong,” Ben said forcefully. “You let Palpatine into my head and did nothing to help me. You were never there for me, not you and not Anakin…none of them. And Rey? You did even worse to her.”

Luke didn’t deny it. “We want to help you save her,” he said instead. 

“You want to clear your conscience,” Ben countered, “but if you think you can help me get her back, that’s all that matters.”

“You are the dyad,” Luke said. “You must balance the light and the darkness. It is the only way.”

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that. She hates you and she hates the Jedi. She’s embraced the darkness.”

“So had you,” Luke reminded him. “But here you are.”

Ben wanted to explain that it was different for her, that she had been keeping herself alive by feeding on the dark energy, but decided that it didn’t matter if his uncle understood, it only mattered if he helped her. “Then how can I fix it?” he said shortly. “Can I fix it at all or are we destined to be on opposite sides forever, for balance? Do I have to become Kylo Ren again for her to just be Rey?”

“No, you must move to the center with her. Find a place that is neither light nor dark and make your stand. She will come to you- it is the nature of the dyad.”

With that, Luke vanished, leaving Ben alone and irritated as he had always been after spending more than a few seconds in Luke’s presence. 

Finding the center seemed like one of those things that was much easier in theory than it was in reality, so he decided that simply refusing to become Kylo Ren again and loving her until she gave into her own needs, would have to do.

He left the bedroom behind and found her standing on a broken staircase, watching as a group of stormtroopers shoveled out debris.

She didn’t turn to look at him when he arrived, but he felt her reach out to him through the bond, searching again to make sure he was really there. 

“Did you know that this is where Vader tried to save Padme?” she said without preamble. “He built the whole castle for her, to try and open a portal and bring her back.” Her eyes were bright when she finally turned and smiled at him, still the sickly yellow that made his skin creep over his bones as though it could escape from the unnatural tint of her gaze. 

“No, I didn’t know that,” he told her truthfully. “Snoke didn't tell me much about Vader’s humanity.”

“Hmm,” she said. “He spent years trying to save her, like I saved you.” There were tears in her eyes as she looked at him and he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her into his chest until she relaxed against him. The anger that she kept so tightly wrapped around her faded as she listened to the steady beat of his heart. 

“I missed you,” she said with a sigh, and Ben nudged his own soft feelings toward her across the fragile bridge of their bond. He wanted her to remember that he loved her, that he wanted her for what she had been before all of this had turned her into something she had never been meant to be. 

She hummed, satisfaction and contentment a steady pulse in the Force around her, until the darkness that had gripped her seemed to sense that it was losing control. She doubled over in pain, her breath coming from between pale lips in short gasps and grunts of sound that were almost inhuman. 

This thing that had gripped her, was going to fight to keep her. 

He wanted to help her, to push away everything that had hurt her, but before he could think of what to do, she had stood upright again, drawing herself up to her full diminutive height. The pain on her face was gone, and the dark foul energy of the Force was coursing through her. 

“Rey…”

“I want you to rule beside me,” she interrupted, and she held out a black gloved hand as she echoed his own plea to her in the throne room of the Supremacy. “Please.” 

  
  



	16. Extricate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How can you see into my eyes like open doors?  
> Leading you down, into my core  
> Where I've become so numb, without a soul  
> My spirit's sleeping somewhere cold  
> Until you find it there, and lead it, back, home- Bring Me to Life, Evanescence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've decided that it works best for the story if there is only one more chapter after this so we are almost done! Thank you for your patience and support!

Her plea washed over him with the memories it carried- memories of when he had been lost in the dark and she had been the only light he could see, the only beacon that remained with the power to draw him out.

He didn’t care about the malicious legacy of the Sith or the foolish pride of the Jedi. He had been willing to let it die then, and he was willing to let it die now. There was only one thing that mattered to him.

Rey.

He reached for her and her eyes narrowed, suspicious as he extended his hand and he wondered if  _ she  _ was remembering the Supremacy and how she had lifted her hand toward his only to reach for a lightsaber instead of him.

He had no such tricks, and the black leather of her glove was smooth against his palm as he lifted her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles.

“I don’t have to join you- I’ve been on your side since I came to you on Exegol. I want you to be happy.”

“You’ll be Kylo Ren again?”

He studied her face carefully, tipping her chin up so that he could examine the yellow of her eyes and the dark shadows cast by her bones. He wondered how long it had been since she had eaten, if food tasted like ash on her tongue as it had for him for so many years.

“If that’s what you truly want,” he told her quietly, ignoring the stormtroopers as they scurried about below and pressing a soft kiss to the corner of her mouth. Her breath was coming in short pants and her heart was fluttering in her chest when he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. “Is it?”

“I…” she said, stumbling over her words as he flooded her with his warmth and his desire, bringing it with him into the darkness as she had once done for him as she sat wet and shivering on that wretched island with Luke. “I want you with me.”

“I am with you,” he assured her, reveling in the spark of joy that flared to life inside her, meeting it with his own as his. “I won’t ever go away from you again.”

“Never,” she repeated fiercely, fingers tightening hard on his arms.

“Do you want me to be Kylo Ren again, Rey? To let the darkness in until I can’t want anything else?”

Her eyes snapped up to meet his.

“You will want me,” she commanded harshly.

“I want you now,” he said. “I don’t have to be Kylo Ren to give you that.”

“This is what you wanted,” she insisted, confusion and agitation beginning to overwhelm the joy she felt. “You wanted to turn me to the dark side, remember? You told me when I was on Pasana.”

He nodded- he did remember. “At the end I did because I was angry that you hadn’t joined me. I thought that was the only way for us to be together, but it isn’t. I know that now. We do not have to walk the path of the Sith.”

“I won’t be a Jedi,” she snarled, writhing in his arms as she tried to pull away. “I want nothing to do with their teachings.”

“Neither do I,” he promised, refusing to let her go until the truth of his words settled into her mind and she stopped struggling. “There is life beyond the Jedi and the Sith remember? Let the past die,” he urged. “Make something else with me, something new.”

“What can we make that is not repeating the mistakes of the past?” For a moment she looked genuinely curious…then she shook her head, a small moan of pain slipping from between her lips.

Ben sighed deeply, frustration coiling in every muscle as she slumped against him. Every time he could sense her resolve slipping, the darkness punished her, dragging her back under with pain and anger. She had let it in so deeply that it had taken root inside her, twining its way through her consciousness and wrapping around each cell that had fed from it to prevent her death.

She no longer had the option of simply changing her mind as he had done.

He bent quickly and caught her beneath the knees with his arm, lifting her up until she was cradled against him like a child and then turning to retreat back up the stairs. He tightened his arms when she wiggled and ignored her furious glare.

“Put me down,” she snapped but he shook his head.

“No,” he told her bluntly. “You aren’t feeling well, and you need to lie down.”

“I can take care of myself,” she insisted, nearly knocking him off balance as she struck out with the Force.

He clucked his tongue at her disapprovingly as he turned the corner, but his amusement turned to shock when she set her teeth against his arm and bit down hard. He hissed and shifted his grip on her, his dark look enough to stop several troopers as they stepped forward to try and intervene.

She was the Supreme Leader, but they had not forgotten his face and they remembered just as much the violence that Kylo Ren and been capable of. He let them go when they decided wisely to turn and retreat back down the hallway, pretending they had seen nothing.

He couldn’t deny that he’d been disoriented when she had first pulled him back from wherever he had gone- finding out you’d been dead for a year and that life had moved on without you in several unexpected and unpleasant ways was a shock that he thought would have sent anyone reeling. It had taken him some time to get his wits about him again, figure out how the world fit together now and what was expected of him.

Now, he had the answers. He knew what had happened, what mattered, and what was standing in his way from getting it. He just had to love her and keep her alive long enough to figure out how to get the darkness out of her safely. Then he could take his uncle’s advice about meeting her in the middle and bringing balance to the Force.

He threw open the door to her chambers and then kicked it closed behind him, locking it with a subtle nudge of his mind, and Rey went absolutely still in his arms when she realized where he had taken her. Her eyes moved restlessly over his face before settling on his mouth, her own lip caught firmly between her teeth as she stared at him.

He had brought her here to rest, to make her get some sleep and some food into her body so that he could begin to restore her health and make her less dependent on the dark side for survival. He needed her to be strong, but now she was looking at him like she wanted nothing more than to press her mouth to his like she had on Exegol and he wasn’t sure about his own strength and his ability to resist her.

“Ben,” she said softly, using her thumb to pull gently down on his bottom lip until each warm exhale of his breath sent shocks of arousal and curiosity through the bond. He felt the darkness swell inside her and then she set her teeth, lifted her lips in a snarl and  _ pushed it away,  _ unwilling to let it disrupt her thoughts or her body.

_ Ah _

Realization swept over him as he peered down into her face, to where her lips were parted and her tongue dipped out to leave a trace of moisture that glistened on the soft pink of her skin. She was locked in a battle between the dark she had come to depend on and the desire she had to be with him above everything else. The time spent without him had hurt her, made her greedy for him in a way that he both understood completely and found utterly surprising.

He could use that greed, the desperation that she felt to be close to him, to encourage her to fight the grip that the dark had on her. Make her choose between them, and she might have enough strength to cast it out.

He glanced at the bed and her eyes followed before springing back to his, her expression one of hesitant longing. They’d had such little time on Exegol, barely enough for him to learn the curve of her mouth and the soft scent of her skin. If she wasn’t ready…

That was enough of a puzzle enough for him, so he didn’t let his mind linger on the question of whether  _ he _ was ready. Nothing under the tutelage of Luke or Snoke had prepared him for this- there had been no time for women in his life before Rey.

She leaned forward, pressing her lips to his with an eagerness that surpassed even the first time on Exegol, and his doubts vanished. Her teeth clacked painfully against his, the pressure of her mouth bruising in her rush, but he only held her tighter as everything in him responded to the eruption of heat and pleasure that flared between them.

The newly reforged connection between them sang, and he could feel the threads that bound them winding tighter now that they were once again focused on the same goal. It felt good, and right, and very much like home.

Her teeth scraped against his tongue when she parted her lips and he finally, finally, licked his way into the soft recesses of her mouth, discovering a sweet taste and soft velvet feel that made his head spin as he covered the space between them and the bed in two long, blind steps. He bumped the bed with his knees, thankful for the Force’s guidance in helping him navigate to exactly where he needed to be and lowered her to the soft welcome of the mattress.

There were no thick, soft blankets here like he would have found on the last bed he had slept in. The heat of Mustafar didn’t require such things like the cold vastness of space, so she slid a little on the cool, slick sheets as he lowered himself down over her.

Her hands were fast and greedy, fingers trembling with need as she reached for the hem of his borrowed shirt and began to lift. He hissed a soft breath when her fingertips brushed against the skin of his stomach, hotter by far than anything else on this molten hellscape of a planet. He kissed her again, more deeply, certain that they were going to burn up from the contact but too lost in her to care.

She moaned, the sound deep and guttural, an unholy mix of pleasure and intense physical pain, and he knew she was fighting against the darkness, pushing it away as it struggled to overtake her mind. He rained kisses over her face, whispering words of praise and encouragement in her ear until it passed and she relaxed beneath him.

So it went again and again as they peeled the clothes from each other’s bodies and explored every inch of flesh beneath. She was unable to focus for longer than a few minutes before her muscles would clench and she would cry out in agony.

He almost broke under the sound, under the steady flood of pain that crept across the bond as it strengthened, but her inner conflict and the effort that she was exerting to force the darkness away did not dampen her enthusiasm for his touch.

She kissed a path down his throat and across his chest, over places that had once been marred with the scars of battles before she had placed her hands on him and healed all his hurts, old and new. She hummed gently over each expanse of newly smooth skin, as though she knew the exact location of every scar that she had erased.

Perhaps she did, he realized. Maybe she had taken the memory of his pain and not the evidence that he had lived it.

She had not been as lucky, he realized as he scanned her body. The beautiful curves were still marked with all the signs of the years she had lived, the violence that had been inflicted upon her. He had not had enough energy on Exegol to do more than stir the breath in her lungs and restore the flicker of life behind her eyes.

He would make up for that, and for every other way that he’d failed her, now and for as long as he had breath in his body.

A soft noise rumbled in his chest when his mouth found the mound of her breast and then the hard pink crest of her nipple. She shivered under the onslaught of his lips and the gentle drag and pull of his teeth.

Her eyes popped wide with surprise when he slid his hand down over the flat expanse of her stomach to nestle at the apex of her thighs, but her need was stronger than her brief uncertainty and her knees opened at his gentle prodding.

She pressed her face into the side of his neck as he slid his fingers experimentally through the wet heat of her folds, gathering the slickness that he found there and spreading it as he learned the most intimate contours of her body.

Her hips lifted off the bed, body tense and shaking as another cycle of pain pushed into her. This time a scream ripped from her throat, a harsh sound that seemed to carry on endlessly until she collapsed back against the bed, limp and defeated.

There were tear tracks on her cheeks, glimmering lines of wetness that followed the freckled lines of her cheeks and he kissed them away, the taste of salt lingering on his tongue. Her eyes swept open, one brief moment of absolute clarity as she looked at him with the familiar hazel eyes that had haunted his dreams.

“Get it out of me,” she pleaded. “Help me.”

He nodded, swallowing hard, and she closed her eyes, head dropping back against the pillow in relief.

When she opened them again, the yellow had once again resurfaced but he knew that she was still holding on and he acted on instinct, sinking his fingers into her with a confidence that he did not really feel and kissing her intently as he worked his hand inside her.

She rolled her head, tossing from side to side and gripping the sheets tight in her clenched fists as the tears that leaked from the corners of eyes began to run red and crimson drops dripped from her nose to run over her lips and chin.

Ben’s stomach seized with fear and the cold metallic taste of it coated his tongue. She was fighting so hard to reach him, to break free of the energy that held her, that it was damaging her body. He would not let her die, could not see the dyad broken again. He could not imagine a life where she did not exist, and he knew the galaxy would not be so lucky a second time.

He rose to cover her quickly, whispering reassurances as her heartbeat slowed and her fingertips turned cold. She frightened, he could feel it clawing at his mind, but she hadn’t given up and he refused to let her go.

“Keep trying,” he urged. “Stay with me, Rey. Be with me.”

She smiled at that, something in his words sparking a feeling of peace inside her.

“Be with me,” she repeated, pulling him down and kissing him again, shifting her hips restlessly as she sought to be closer to him. She was strong but fading and the memory of her eyes, open and glassy in the blue haze of Exegol, rose into his mind to terrify him.

He fumbled, uncertain and inexperienced, but pushed his body into hers as he pushed his life Force into her through the bond, fusing them together as one in every way possible. He allowed for no separation, no time for her to think about anything other than her desire to be with him and he infused her with the energy that she needed to push back against the greedy dark until pink returned to her cheeks and her heartbeat returned to its normal rhythm.

He was afraid, briefly, that it would be too much, and they would be doomed to repeat the cycle from Exegol again. She would be overcome by the effects of fighting the dark and he would have to give his life to save her, thus beginning this nightmare over again.

But he had been weak on Exegol, barely healed by Rey after the unfortunate stabbing on Kef Bir and stripped of most of what remained of him by Palpatine, it had taken all of him to restore her life. Now he was strong, healthy and when she had taken all she needed from him there was plenty to spare.

“Don’t stop,” she begged, burying her face in his neck and holding tight as he moved inside her with purpose. Her legs were already wrapped around his waist, her arms around his torso, as close to him as she could get physically when she reached for his mind with hers.

She was bright and whole, relief and pleasure flooding through every fiber of her as she repeated his name softly in his ear. Every sensation was doubled as the bond between them opened wide, restored now and strong. He could feel everything she felt as they moved and breathed in perfect unison.

When his world shattered and he spilled himself inside her she cried out, her body following him into ecstasy, unable to resist as she was overwhelmed with the echoes of what he experienced.

He rolled to one side, afraid of crushing her with his weight, and she sighed contentedly and snuggled in closer to his chest. When she peered up at him her eyes were hazel and her mind was clear.

“I love you,” she said quickly, as though she had been holding on to it and couldn’t stand to keep it in another second. “I think I did the first time I saw you, but I was afraid.”

“I love you, too,” he told her honestly. “But I can’t believe you did all of this for me.”

“I did what I had to do,” she said and if she had any regrets it didn’t show on her face. “I meant what I said before. I won’t be a Jedi.”

“Neither will I,” he agreed. “So what will we be? What will we do now?”


	17. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wake me up inside  
> Call my name and save me from the dark  
> Bid my blood to run  
> Before I come undone  
> Save me from the nothing I've become  
> Now that I know what I'm without  
> You can't just leave me  
> Breathe into me and make me real- Bring Me to Life, Evanescence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last of this is just a short epilogue to show how things have gone for them. This story didn't go the way I expected and it was very hard toward the end to be in the right headspace to write it but I don't give up on fics and leave readers hanging without an ending so I hope you were able to enjoy it despite my struggles. This helped me in many ways to process my feelings toward Rey's end as a character and for that alone I am grateful to the story and to all of you for reading!

_ Five years later _

Coruscant was beautiful and it was home, but Rey never got tired of the visits they made to Mustafar.

The planet, like the rest of the galaxy, was healing. The trees no longer burned, and the ground was cool to the touch. The skies, once red and angry, were a cool and tranquil blue.

The castle still stood over the bog, finally rebuilt years ago as she and Ben had sat down with those closest to them and spent months plotting out the future of the galaxy, but now it was a place that they came to for peace, not an isolated self-made prison for those who had lost what the could not bear to lose.

She wondered often, as she cared for her children and loved her husband, what Anakin would have thought of what they had made of it. She hoped he was proud of her, for achieving what he had not, for finding that which she loved and making a life.

There had been consequences, of course. There was still an ache that lingered in her bones, a place that the dark used to fill that was now empty and still craved it. She still woke sometimes from her nightmares, where the end of the bond was once again broken, with screams of agony on her lips.

But when she did, Ben turned to her in the bed they shared and pressed a kiss against her cheek, muttering words of reassurance and reaching out to her through the Force, proving to her that he was still there and she had no reason to fear.

And so she ignored the ache and was grateful that the nightmares came less often now, chased away by her certainty of his presence, his love. Her fears had gradually diminished as their bond had grown stronger over the years- it now far surpassed what it had been in those early days, when she lost him.

Which is how he knew, almost before she did, that they would be having another child.

She lay on her back in their bed, his cheek pressed against her still flat stomach as they felt the small flutter of life inside her.

“Have you told Temiri yet?” he asked. “Or the twins?”

“Not yet,” she said quietly, brushing a lock of dark hair from his forehead. “They’ll be thrilled to have a younger sibling, but I wanted to keep it just between us for a little while.”

He grinned. “That’s hard to do when all the kids are Force sensitive. Not to mention Finn and Ahsoka back at the temple on Coruscant.”

She sighed. “There is no keeping of secrets in this family, is there?”

“Definitely not,” he said. “Besides, there’s a whole galaxy that has its eyes on you.”

She frowned, “It’s a miracle that they’ve forgiven me at all, but I still don’t understand how they’ve grown to love me so much.”

“I would love to give you and your charming personality all the credit, but you know how persuasive Hux and Poe can be when they put their heads together. It was a stroke of brilliance when they convinced everyone that it was all a ploy to save the son of their beloved Leia Organa and the nephew of the famous Luke Skywalker.”

“And who better to rule the galaxy than Ben Solo and his bride?” she said with a rueful shake of her head. “Since they think we defeated the Sith.”

“You are a beautiful empress, and the galaxy has flourished under our rule. Even if the people don’t know everything, they know enough. Even Luke said we did the right thing, uniting what was left of the Resistance with the military might of the First Order. We brought peace and prosperity.”

“We had a little help from the Council and the new Senate, but I suppose we did.”

“And we’ve made a family,” he said, kissing her stomach and looking up at her with pride. “Not bad for how we started.”

She remembered the fights and the screams, the loss and despair. All of those things were behind them now, replaced with love and the family she had always wanted.

“Not bad at all,” she agreed. 


End file.
